The Study of Marriage Postponement Process in the Youth: A Phenomenological Study

The purpose of this study was to study the phenomenological process of postponing marriage in young people in order to understand different aspects of this phenomenon and how young people perceive it.

To achieve the  research goal, a qualitative approach and a descriptive phenomenological method were utilized. The research population included single and never-married girls and boys living in Tehran between the ages of 28 to 34 years for girls, and 32 to 38 years for boys. Purposeful sampling was used with the convenient sampling and 13 individuals including 7 girls and 6 boys were selected as the sample.y. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed by Colaizzi method.

Finally, the research findings reported falls into 12 main themes and 61 sub-themes. The main themes are: economic concerns, idealism, fear of future marriage, the impact of premarital relationships, motivational processes, immaturity and readiness for marriage, the role of family barriers, socio-cultural factors, selection constraints, preconceived notions of marriage, positive consequences and negative consequences.

The results showed that postponing marriage is a complex phenomenon which is affected by objective constraints, limiting mental perceptions and insufficient maturity and has many negative consequences for young people. It seems that the efforts of the counseling and psychological community to produce content in the fields of creating a culture of easy marriage process, reviving the values of marriage, correcting the misconceptions of young people, and dissemination of successful marriages in the social media and networks, is an effective step to remove mental barriers of marriage.