We all want love, right? We all want that special person with us for a lifetime. Whether he's afraid to commit or propose, there is a true mental process men go through when choosing to marry the woman of their dreams. This process can be described with the four E's: example, experience, employment and emotions.
1. Example
Men can see the good example in their parent's marriage or even those friends' parents who stayed together through thick and thin.
"If your parents were happily married, you saw how two different people can somehow manage to live a life together," Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happy Families," says.
We are all greatly affected by our upbringing and the example of our parents. Men take this into consideration when deciding who to marry, and it sways them in one direction or another.
2. Experience
Men think about their experiences from past dates and girlfriends. Do they feel it's the right time and the right one? We are given great foresight about this from John Molloy's book "Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others."
He interviewed men who had recently proposed and discovered the reason they decided to commit.
"They had not stopped dating. It's just that they were no longer going to singles hangouts and trying to pick up women several times a week. Picking up women was no longer their main reason for going out ... They told us the singles scene was not as much fun as it used to be."
In other words, when a man is ready to move on to a new experience (like settling down), he goes for it.
3. Employment
Are men stable in their employment? Do they have their career all worked out and on the right path, or are they still struggling? Again, John Molloy enlightens us on why this has a great bearing on whether men decide it's the right time to get married or not.
Single men told Molloy new possibilities opened up once they graduated and found a job.
"For the first time, a majority of them have some independence," he says. "All of a sudden, they have a nice car and an apartment and an income."
A man might not feel fully ready to commit to a woman until he has his own life figured out, Malloy says.
4. Emotions
Believe it or not, men want to be in a loving relationship - someone to spend time with and someone to come home to at night. Men want a stable environment as well, so when they find the girl they feel understood and loved by, they want to make the relationship permanent. They feel acceptance. They feel excitement.
Robin Reed from The Good Men Project says it well: "I've learned that being 'in love' is mostly showing up, being known with all my perceived weaknesses, warts and character defects to receive that accepting smile from my partner."
This sense of love in a relationship is part of the mental process men feel when choosing the woman they want to marry.
The process of finding a woman and considering marriage can be exciting and scary at the same time, but one thing we know for sure is there is a great mental process men undergo when deciding on tying the knot.
