If you remain unmarried past a certain point in your life there are two thoughts that I can guarantee that you have had. 1. I wish I was married by now. 2. I’m so glad I didn’t marry who I thought I was wanted to marry.

Although I do desire to be married, there are some relationships that I am glad didn’t make it down the aisle. That is the gift that time has given me: hindsight, evaluation and self-awareness. I do want to be married but to the right person and the right way. It can be hard to wait but I want remind you that there are some benefits to waiting.

In “The meaning of marriage” Author Timothy Keller says that the greatest number of marriages that end in divorce, as it relates to age, are those that happen before 18. However, marrying after 25 makes your chances of divorce relatively low. That’s great news, right? At least when you finally find the person yall have a better chance of staying married. You may be thinking “25 would have been fine,- I’m well over 25 now.” That may be true but technically there are still some benefits to waiting.

  Later in life, you are more likely to be grounded in who you are. By then you have had some losses and some lessons. Hopefully, you know what you want and don’t want and know what pitfalls to avoid. Time gives you the benefit of experience and hopefully, experience gives you wisdom and allows you to choose a good mate for marriage. 

Let’s be clear though, even when you finally get married there is always more work to do inside the marriage. I don’t think we ever finish growing. My mentor says some people do the work on the front end before marriage, some do it on the back end inside the marriage. Well for those of us doing the growing on the front end and hopefully marriage on the back end I want to encourage you to keep hope alive. Your day is still coming, your process just may look a little different.

Being last isn’t fun but at 33 it definitely allows you to learn from others’ mistakes. Time can be a burden or a luxury. It’s a burden if we only see time as punishment and not as preparation. It can be a luxury if we use it to our advantage and prepare while we wait. The benefit is not in waiting but in what we do with the time while we wait.