You want a husband or wife. But are you ready to be one?

There is a considerable difference between wanting to get married and actually being ready to be married, although I don't think we always distinguish between the two particularly well. Marriage is still one of those milestones that we associate with becoming an adult: you establish a career, find a partner, get married, perhaps buy a house and have children. Even though modern life rarely follows such a neat sequence, there can still be a sense that marriage is something you're eventually supposed to do. Your friends begin getting engaged, people around you are settling down, and at some point you start wondering whether you should be doing the same.

The trouble is that wanting the things we associate with marriage tells us very little about whether somebody is actually ready for the relationship itself. You can desperately want a husband, a wife, children, a home, family holidays and somebody to grow old with while still being nowhere near ready for the responsibilities involved in building that life with another person.

Perhaps one of the more useful questions to ask before marriage, then, isn't simply whether you've found the right person. It's whether you've developed enough of your own adult identity to be capable of being somebody else's partner.

That doesn't mean having your entire life figured out. I certainly don't subscribe to the idea that you need a perfect career, a particular salary, a house and an immaculate five-year plan before you're entitled to get married. People change careers throughout their lives. Businesses fail. People retrain, relocate, lose jobs, discover new ambitions and sometimes realise that the career they spent years pursuing makes them miserable. Plenty of wonderful marriages have begun when both people had very little money and absolutely no idea where life would eventually take them.

The issue isn't uncertainty. It's how you behave within that uncertainty.

If you don't yet know what career you want, where you want to live, how you intend to support yourself, what sort of lifestyle you want or what actually matters to you, and you aren't particularly taking responsibility for figuring those things out, marriage doesn't resolve that confusion. It simply brings another person into it. They may then find themselves waiting for you to establish the basic foundations of your own life before the life you supposedly planned together can really begin.

That's very different from saying somebody shouldn't marry because they're changing careers or don't earn very much. Someone can be in a financially precarious position and still demonstrate enormous maturity. They might say, This isn't where I want to be, so this is what I'm doing about it. They have agency. They're making decisions, trying things, learning from mistakes and accepting responsibility for the consequences. Compare that with somebody whose answer to every major life question is essentially, I don't know; I'm sure something will work out. The external circumstances might look similar, but the experience of being married to those two people could be completely different.

I think this is where relationships can accidentally develop a parent-child dynamic. Imagine one person feels reasonably ready to build a life. They know roughly where they'd like to live, they're thinking about finances, perhaps they're considering children, and they have some idea of what the next few years might look like. Their partner is still trying to work out all of those things. Initially, the more settled partner may be incredibly supportive. They understand that everyone develops at a different pace and they genuinely want the person they love to succeed.

Over time, however, support can quietly turn into management. One person starts doing the reminding, planning, organising, researching, budgeting, encouraging and problem-solving. They ask whether the application has been sent, whether the appointment has been made, whether the bill has been paid and what the plan is now that the previous plan hasn't worked out. Eventually, one partner feels as though they're constantly being nagged, while the other feels as though nothing would happen if they stopped nagging.

That's a miserable dynamic for both people, and it's particularly damaging because it changes the nature of the relationship. It's difficult to maintain an equal romantic partnership when one person increasingly feels responsible for supervising the other person's life. Of course there will be periods in almost every long relationship when one person needs to carry more. Illness happens. People lose jobs. Mental health can deteriorate. Babies arrive. Grief can completely floor someone. Supporting your partner through a difficult period is part of loving them. But there is a difference between carrying somebody temporarily and becoming the permanent executive function for another adult.

Accountability becomes incredibly important here, too, and I suspect it's actually a much better measure of readiness for marriage than having your career or finances perfectly organised. Can you say, I got that wrong? Can you listen when your partner tells you that something you did hurt them without immediately producing an explanation for why it wasn't really your fault? Can you apologise without turning the conversation into a list of everything they've ever done wrong?

You are inevitably going to make mistakes in a marriage. You will misunderstand each other, forget things, become defensive, make poor decisions and occasionally behave in ways you're not particularly proud of. Sometimes you will enter an argument absolutely convinced that you're right and discover, rather inconveniently, that you weren't. A relationship can survive an enormous number of mistakes when two people are capable of acknowledging them and repairing the damage. It becomes considerably harder when one or both people need to preserve an image of themselves as the innocent party in every conflict.

There's also something worth examining when adults repeatedly describe themselves as basically a big kid. Sometimes that simply means somebody is playful, and I hope none of us feels required to give that up. Being an adult doesn't mean becoming boring. Play video games, build LEGO, go on rollercoasters, jump into swimming pools and order dessert first if that's what makes you happy.

There is, however, another version of perpetual childhood that has much less to do with playfulness and much more to do with responsibility. It's the assumption that somebody else will remember the difficult things, create the structure, worry about the consequences, make the plans and eventually step in when things go wrong. If that has been the pattern throughout your life, there's a real danger that a spouse simply becomes the next person expected to perform that role.

This is why I think we spend too much time before marriage asking whether the other person would make a good husband or wife and perhaps not enough time asking whether we would make a good one. That's not a question about whether you're worthy of love. It's much more practical than that. Can you communicate when something is uncomfortable? Can you manage your responsibilities reasonably well? Can you tolerate disagreement? Can you contribute to a household? Can you make decisions and follow through on them? Can you tell somebody what you need rather than expecting them to guess? Can you support another person's ambitions alongside your own? Do you have some sense of the life you're inviting them into?

You don't need a perfect answer to every one of those questions. In fact, I would be suspicious of anybody who thought they did. The important part is whether you recognise that those things are your responsibility to work on.

A good relationship should absolutely help us grow. A partner can challenge you, encourage you, expose you to different ways of thinking and sometimes believe in you long before you believe in yourself. Marriage itself changes people because living intimately with another human being forces you to confront parts of yourself that are much easier to ignore when you're alone.

But there is a significant difference between growing alongside somebody and expecting them to drag you into adulthood.

Your partner can support you while you change careers, build a business, retrain, struggle financially or try to work out what comes next. They may carry more of the financial burden for a period, relocate for you or make enormous sacrifices while you pursue something important. That's part of what partnership can look like. What becomes difficult is when one person's uncertainty turns into a permanent holding pattern for the other.

And perhaps we need to become more comfortable with the possibility that sometimes the answer is simply: I'm not ready yet.

You can meet a wonderful person and still not be ready to marry them. You can love somebody deeply and recognise that you need another few years to establish yourself. You can want children but realise that there are parts of your life you need to take responsibility for first. You can even discover that you've been pursuing marriage largely because it felt like the next thing an adult was supposed to do.

None of those realisations represents failure. If anything, recognising that you're not yet ready to intertwine your future with somebody else's may demonstrate considerably more maturity than getting married simply because you want to feel grown up.

Marriage isn't graduation from childhood, nor is a spouse somebody who arrives to organise the parts of adulthood you haven't yet learned to manage. You're asking another human being to intertwine their time, home, finances, plans and potentially decades of their future with yours. You certainly don't need to have everything figured out before you make that commitment. Very few of us ever do.

But you should probably be taking responsibility for figuring out your own life rather than quietly hoping that marriage or the person you marry will do it for you.