Why guys don’t marry their girlfriends

I had a few thoughts I had on the topic.  There are probably a lot of reasons.  Here’s what I came up with:

1. Not the marrying type of man.  A (wealthy) guy with a lot of prospects who juggles several girlfriends and doesn’t really commit to any of them.
2. Guy who lives with his girlfriend, but she’s not a slam dunk.  He’s got a stable job and income; she likes that.  But for him, why buy the cow?  Also, perhaps deep down, she’s not the one.
3. A guy who is philosophically against marriage and the conventionality of it and its restrictions on possible other relationships.  Does not believe open marriage works either.
4. A guy who doesn’t want kids, and if he doesn’t want kids, he doesn’t see the point in getting married either.

Now if you extend the discussion to gay male couples.  There is a great excuse for not being married.  Generally most states don’t allow you to get married.  In any case, the federal government doesn’t provide similar benefits.  In order to get company benefits, you may have to be domestic partners, but this isn’t the same thing.

But actually overall, I would think that most gay guys would actually tend to be more domestic types.  I.e. the type who might be more likely to consider getting married if allowed.

Settling vs Man of my dreams, according to mag author

[The Atlantic] This article theoretically has tangential relationship to me, but yet had some resonance. I have no insight into the article’s premise that most single older women want to be married and have children. But if I go along with that train of thought, the conclusions arrived at by the author seem unavoidable. So for girls there is a certain amount of trading off of the teenage “Damn, he’s fine. I’d like to get in those pants” over time with “Even though I cringe at sex with him, he makes good money and doesn’t hit me even if he’s angry”. And always there’s that clock running theme. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but the author herself admits that for women who want children, the choices do seem to get progressively worse. She says that you should decide to settle for ‘good enough’ earlier say at 25 or 30, when your good enough is still pretty good. When a woman gets to 35 or 40, good enough becomes a series of choices between bad alternatives. She thought she had a trump card by having a child through sperm donation first, but seems to look back on that perhaps with a bit of regret as she is having an understandably hard time of single parenting and her plan to find a mate to help her out. It is — at least on the face of it — a less than enticing situation for potential suitors with other prospects to raise some other man’s child.

One funny part is how she suggests that if children are the goal, marrying a possibly gay man is better than marrying no one at all (her present situation). She even seems to hint