Awhile back the team at Boundless.org ran an article by Danielle Crittenden on the cost of delaying marriage. It contained some counter-cultural statements that tipped the apple cart, even for many Christians. Here are two examples:

But if a woman remains single until her age creeps up past 30, she may find herself tapping at her watch and staring down the now mysteriously empty tunnel, wondering if there hasn’t been a derailment or accident somewhere along the line.

The 33-year-old single woman who decides she wants more from life than her career cannot so readily walk into marriage and children; by postponing them, all she has done is to push them ahead to a point in her life when she has less sexual power to attain them.

The Boundless.org editors were deluged with messages expressing shock and outrage. Many of these were from single women in their 30s who either wanted to be married, but felt they had no options, or enjoyed their singleness and felt insulted by Crittenden’s remarks.
Candice Watters then wrote a sober, winsome response to each of these (and several other) concerns. Here’s an excerpt (she first quotes some of the criticism):

One example: “Do I sound bitter? I am really not bitter. I am frustrated, because I see articles that do not seem to present the other side of the story, that despite our best efforts, some of us have just not met someone. That sometimes a person does not have a choice about delaying marriage, because the possibility has never presented itself.

And another: “I don’t want to sound like a complainer, but I think that the delayed marriage factor has a lot to do with Christian men as well as women. I find it frustrating to be accused of being very independent when I haven’t even had the option of anything else! It’s not like I had ten suitors on my doorstep, and I turned down marriage at 20. I didn’t have the option of marriage at 20 or even 30. … I need the support of the Christian community. Your Boundless article seems to put us all in the bucket of waiting too long or too late. But what about just waiting, because that’s your only choice.”

I think this writer is on to something. The problem of delayed marriage has a lot to do with men who won’t take initiative. Women want to be pursued and men are charged by God to be the pursuers. Proverbs says, “he who finds a wife, ” Finds. That’s no passive verb. It’s active. It instructs the man who wants God’s blessing to get out there and look. And to the men we say, get going. It’s time you accept the challenge to pursue marriage.

To the women, I say stop glorifying the single years as a super-holy season of just you and Jesus. Yes, being single does provide the chance to be uniquely intimate with Jesus. Enjoy that. But don’t advertise it. Why? Because it gives guys permission to kick back and let you. If they think you’re perfectly happy as a single, why wouldn’t they let you stay that way? Especially when so many of them are gun shy. Thanks to a 50 percent (give or take a few points) divorce rate and absentee dad problem, many of them grew up without a mentor (their dad) and without a godly model for what marriage should look like. Many of them are scared, and for good reason.

Read the whole essay from Watters.
Note: The article from Crittenden is (for the most part) an excerpt from her outstanding book on this topic entitled What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman.