Gen Z's Insistence on Noncommitment Is Stunting Our Freedom
The freedom Gen Z gained with their commitment to noncommitment, the "Find Yourself" 20s, isn't offering the joy we were promised.
At least once a week, a recurring nightmare creeps into my sleep: through some unexplained circumstances, I’m single again. Perhaps I never met my husband (or, worse, he left), and my children don’t exist. The weight of this realization sets in quickly and heavily. “I really have to do the whole dating thing… again?”, I ask in anguish. Thankfully, just before Dream Cameron has a full meltdown, I wake up, roll over to check that my husband’s still fast asleep beside me, and fall back asleep smiling.
I got married young. 23 to be exact. My husband was 24. Our first child was born just 18 months later. While we never got significant pressure from our loved ones to put off the wedding, I knew we were going against the grain. Both still in graduate school, our only real income from my part-time nannying gig, and plans to live together in my husband’s two-bedroom apartment in a rough area of Durham, North Carolina after the wedding, we weren’t exactly established.
Meanwhile, most of the people I grew up with were traveling, bouncing around to different jobs across the country, dating if they had the time, and going to the gym as often as they wanted. It wasn’t until several months after our son was born when we moved across the country for my husband’s job that I noticed an inkling of longing. Longing for the freedoms my single (or, really, non-parent) friends enjoyed. I wanted to go out and meet new people, but you can’t leave a toddler at home alone. I wanted to work out every day, but exercising is a lot less enjoyable when your “morning” sickness lasts all day. I wanted to lay in bed when I was sick, but when you get sick, so do your kids, and then they need you more than ever.
I don’t spend much time on social media, but I imagine if I did, I’d see a lot of smiling photos of my old classmates and friends embracing what I call the “Find Yourself” 20s, a time when the only reasonable commitment is to yourself, to fit into that decade of life all the adventures, experiences, mistakes, and identities you’re not supposed to be able to have once you settle down.
Yet, when I talk to my peers, at least the female ones*, there’s something else on their mind: finding a husband. Particularly when we hit 30, a lot of single women today feel a new type of pressure. It’s more than social or psychological. It’s biological. The uncommitted approach to life that brought excitement in their 20s was now responsible for the anxiety and frustration of their early 30s. While I was longing for a bit more of that find-yourself freedom, my single peers were longing for what I had in my husband and children.
Why do we all want what we don’t have?
The only difference was that, in my case, I remember what life was like before I met my husband, before I became a mother, before we bought a house, and before we both started working to pay for that house. I remember a life when the only person relying on me was me, when my evenings were my own and my body hadn’t yet absorbed the immense responsibility of pregnancy and breastfeeding. I remember that freedom.
And, only in my recurring nightmare would I go back to that life. To go back, I’d have to give up the greatest freedom I’ve ever known, the freedom for. I’d have to give up the human relationships that give my life the most meaning: my marriage and children.
Of course, not everyone wants to have kids or even to get married. And, for women who don’t want children, the biological ticker and the 30-year-old deadline matters a lot less. But, the majority of women (and men) do want to become parents one day. For those individuals, I believe we’ve been told only half of the truth about what freedom really is.
In many ways, the Find Yourself 20s offers freedom from the restrictions former generations expected by their early-to-mid 20s (i.e., a lifestyle dominated by marriage, children, and a stable job). But, this freedom is one-sided: we’re free from, but what are we free for?
When I think about this dilemma, Exodus 9:1 comes to mind: “Let My people go, so that they may serve Me”. Whatever your thoughts about religion, Gen Z is living out this dilemma today. Freedom from the Pharoah, the tyrant who enslaved the Israelites of the Old Testament, wasn’t the end goal. Otherwise, the Israelites are left wandering in the desert, alone, confused, and sunburnt. God commanded the Pharoah to release his people (freedom from) so that they could serve him (freedom for). God had a plan for his people’s freedom.
Today, Gen Zers may feel like the shackles of tradition have largely been lifted for them, but what has that freedom left us? With a desert-sized dilemma and no real plan. We’re now responsible for choosing a life for ourselves with enough enduring meaning to justify the inescapable restrictions of humanity (i.e., pain, suffering, biology, aging, dying), but what do we know? Most of us don’t remember 9/11, let alone have the wisdom necessary to make choices today with consequences that will echo on our deathbeds.
Yet we’ve largely abandoned the tradition that supplied sustainable meaning for previous generations despite their similar lack of wisdom. Whereas our grandparents were enveloped in a tradition of marriage, family, and work as their reason for living, today’s 20-somethings tend not to adhere to much of any tradition and, thus, are left to fend for themselves. And, in the age of the internet when most of the people we listen to regularly are individuals we’ve never met and who are as clueless as we are, much of the advice we get is contradictory, over-simplified, and short-sighted.
We’re told that our 20s are largely a throwaway decade of self-exploration and self-gratification. “30 is the new 20”. But, if 30 brings with it a host of anxieties about our biological and logistical limitations, then our 20s matter more than we’ve been led to believe.
Unlike many of today’s supporters of “traditional family values”, I won’t argue that the freedom from a uniform life trajectory granted to my generation is inherently bad. It’s brought with it the opportunity for more young people to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, deepen their education, and build strong social networks outside of their immediate families. Both my husband and I finished graduate school before becoming parents. That would’ve been unheard of when my grandmother was my age.
However, Gen Z desperately needs a rounding out of the whole picture of freedom: if we’re freed from the Pharaoh of a rigid timeline for “settling down”, how do we best use that freedom to live well, virtuously, meaningfully? How can we ensure that our freedom from leads to a freedom for something that matters rather than to aimless desert wanderings?
For many people, the answer is likely to give credit where its due and take more seriously the benefits of getting married younger.
While getting married younger brings with it some restrictions, like sexual and emotional monogamy (yet, married couples tend to report better sex lives, so perhaps these restrictions are actually a net positive?), the lifestyle shift from singlehood to marriage is a paltry appetizer compared to the main course of marriage to parenthood. In many ways, marriage brings with it a host of benefits with few drawbacks when compared to becoming parents. A wife or a husband can still stay out late with friends on a Friday night or book a last-minute weekend getaway together or take a sick day with limited foresight. The vast majority of couples I’ve interacted with admit that they still felt “young, wild, and free” even after getting married, but before having kids, even if they married later than their peers.
However, marriage also encourages future planning, responsibility, and commitment in a way that the paradoxical “committed relationship” doesn’t. For example, having a live-in girlfriend doesn’t evoke nearly the same seriousness in a man as having a wife does. The evidence? Men don’t earn more money when their girlfriends move in. They earn more money when they get married (then a lot more when they become dads).
Getting married means planning a wedding, joining two families together formally, combining finances, changing names, choosing and maintaining a shared home, and attending all family events together. And, most importantly, marriage gets the ball rolling toward starting a family. Yet, contrary to popular belief, this ball rolling can take the pressure off of women to rush into childbearing rather than adding pressure. After all, they’ve already got the first and hardest box checked: Find a Husband. With that puzzle piece taken care of, spouses can plan their families intelligently according to their particular circumstances rather than rushing to beat the biological clock.
Getting married younger - as in, early-to-mid 20s - requires an accelerated maturity compared to the average 20-something today, but it’s still a significant developmental delay compared to previous generations. Yet, the real beauty in young marriage is the lock-in of meaning, the assurance of the freedom for that so many Gen Zers and young Millennials are lacking. Your life becomes not just about another person, but about the lifelong story you two will write together and the multi-generational impact you’ll have by how you choose to live.
If that’s not a worthy freedom for, then I don’t know what is.
*To be fair to the guys, they want to settle down, too, it just sometimes takes them a few extra years to figure that out :)