For those of you who remember, I was in Vancouver last week mainly for my cousin’s wedding.
Being there at his wedding gave me some food for thought about marriage.
I’m 24 this year and I admit that I have thought more than once about what is the right age for me to get married.
Back in the younger days, while I was still a student, marriage was something totally out of the question and for good reason. We were all still young and our minds had yet to mature to a stage that we know what we want.
Now however, even at my relatively young and tender age I feel that I know what I want in a wife now and if I do find it, I won’t hesitate to get married.
So the question is, what is it that I really look for in a girl.
Well… shamefully I have to admit that when I was in my teens all the way up to say… 21, my only criteria for a girlfriend was that she had to be HOT.
But now as I grow relatively older I see that the things I look for in a girl kinda change. Now a girl’s looks become really really secondary.
She need not be hot, she just needs to be decent looking but what she has to have is a good sense of humour, a cheerful personality and most importantly intelligence.
I like an intelligent girl who can be mentally stimulating and the kind where I can go home after a long day’s work and talk to her about my problems at work and she’ll give me a real solution or put things in a perspective that may make me not worry about it so much anymore.
Something rather than the usual “Don’t worry… I’m sure it’ll be okay” because unfortunately, that line doesn’t work too well in helping us manage the stress right?
Well unless she gets me to put on my lion suit and makes me ROAR!!!
Surely I’ll feel better after that.
So if I find a girl like that and I’m sure about what I see then heck I’ll go get married.
And I don’t think I’m the only one.
Just a couple of years after graduation I’ve been seeing so many of my friends get married one by one (sure some of them were shotgun marriages but I don’t see the big deal with that. Dammit if I loved a girl and we had a shotgun marriage I would gladly tell everyone at my wedding dinner that it was an accident, but an accident I’m glad happened).
Heck, 2 of my ex-girlfriends have already gotten married and at the end of last year, I attended the wedding of one of my best university friends with my Middle-Eastern buddy Hasan who flew in to Malaysia just for the wedding.
But yet, when I talk about getting married, some people try to discourage me possibly for my own good and here are the main two concerns people have.
1) “Build your career first then only get married.”
Well I tend to view things a little differently.
I believe in the saying that in any successful man, there is a woman behind him. I believe that the wife has a direct influence on a man’s success (or failure).
So that tells you that your wife is going help you get to where you want in your career, and you don’t have to do it all alone! Besides, I’m sure our parents didn’t marry at the peak of their careers, they all got married when they were still building their careers and were there for each other during the hard times.
Of course there is the question of financial stability and maybe my opinion is a little skewed now since unlike 2 years ago when I just graduated, I feel like I now have achieved some kind of financial stability.
But either ways, I believe that whether rich or poor, a great couple is a couple that endures hardship together.
I know of this successful entrepreneur in Malaysia who got married at a young age while he was still struggling. During the first few years of his marriage, his business that was doing well for a while eventually failed so his wife supported him by working to put food on the table for the family while he worked on another business.
That other business he built today is worth hundreds of millions and today his wife doesn’t need to work no more.
2) “Don’t marry so early. Enjoy yourself while you’re still young”.
Well the way I look at it is that marriage is just the next phase in our lives.
The stigma or at least the influence from many movies we watch is that once you get married, you lose your freedom and you’re tied down forever. While there is some truth in that, I like to think the cons are a little exaggerated and the pros of not getting married are a little overplayed.
Ok one of the pros people talk about is that you get to be in a variety of relationships throughout the years. Well to be frank, I can’t say that I’ve been in a lot myself but I think I’ve been in enough to feel that after a while, each different relationship feels kind of the same anyway.
Then there is the fear of getting married.
I mean sure you probably would have more responsibilities but look at the bright side, for the rest of your life you get to wake up to someone you love and whenever you’re in trouble or worry, you know that someone will always be there for you when you go home.
Now if you think about that, why try to delay marriage? If you meet the one, go for it.
I know I would if I met her.
Any of my married readers disagree with me or think I’m high on weed?
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space