Get married, have kids, dedicate your life to making theirs better. There’s a reason the vast majority of people in history have gone this route - it’s very fulfilling.
Anyone thinking of taking this advice and starting a family should be aware of a few things.
- A number of studies have been conducted on the impact of marriage/kids on personal happiness. Married people report that their children are the largest source of happiness in their lives, but singles report higher overall happiness. On the other hand, married people tend to live longer and have better health outcomes.
- Long-term, married couples (20+ years) report way higher happiness in old age than elderly singles.
- The largest source of marital stress is finances (you can invest a practically infinite amount in raising a kid and the pressure to invest more so is high). So if you're not financially secure you probably shouldn't take the parent's advice.
- For men: the majority of divorces are female-initiated and the most common reason given is infidelity. So if you aren't comfortable with having just one sex partner for the rest of your life, getting married is a risky proposition.
It's fair to say that marriage and kids are a high risk, high reward, life-altering proposition. Everyone has to draw their own conclusions about the exact risk/reward profile for them. As a man my take is that the later in life you do it, the better off you'll be. Older men tend to be more financially secure and have lower libidos, mitigating the two largest risks of getting married. There's arguably some social responsibility to not have kids if you won't do a good job of raising them -- if you're going to mess up the person you bring into the world, it's probably best for society if you don't conceive in the first place.
Still, finding love later in life is quite a good thing. If it happens, then that's wonderful.
http://fortune.com/2016/05/09/mothers-marriage-parenthood/
Comparing couples with and without children, researchers found that the rate of the decline in relationship satisfaction is nearly twice as steep for couples who have children than for childless couples. In the event that a pregnancy is unplanned, the parents experience even greater negative impacts on their relationship.
It’s even worse for women than for men.
I for one do not like small children. Everything about small children and babies irritate me and I never wanted to be a father for that reason.
On the other hand, I became attached to my now step children from the first day I met them and I would move heaven and earth for them. But, they were already 9 and 14. Luckily, my wife also didn’t want more kids when we met. I’ll freely admit that it’s mostly caused by selfishness. Not financial selfishness, but with a teenager and a preteen, we never had to find babysitters when we wanted to go out and my wife and I could have plenty of alone time.
When I hung out with just my (step) children we could actually relate. In a lot of ways, I’m a big kid and they always joke when I say something that “this is reason number X that I will never make father of the year”.
This is one of those things that can't be "tested", so it is better to be sure before having kids. Personally I've decided against having kids, maybe I'll regret when I am 50, but for now I don't. Fortunately for me, there are enough humans in the planet already, so a few of us not having kids should only have positive impact, at least in the short term.
And here was me thinking it was a self reinforcing survivor-ship bias.
Less sarcastically, this vastly depends on the culture and time you were born in. For women even just fifty years ago this was the only option they had. Now we see people finding more satisfaction in their careers, travels, public service and so forth.
In my early thirties I was, let's say "very friendly with the ladies." I simply could not imagine being monogamous, and couldn't understand why anyone would want to be.
Then I met the woman who became my wife and I almost immediately didn't want any other woman. I don't mean that I came to accept that I wouldn't have any others, or anything like that. I mean that I simply didn't want anyone else. Other women became like abstract beings: attractive, but I was content to view them from afar. There was only one particular woman I actually wanted to make physical contact with.
I know that may sound kind of weird and new-agey, but it was literally like a switch flipping to another position, and almost 18 years later, it's never flipped back. My wife can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes, but my life would be lacking something critical without her, specifically, in it.