If you're not a little bit married yourself, you probably know a couple that is:  they've dated for years, they live together and they act like they're married... but they're not.  In her book A Little Bit Married, SoulCycle rider HANNAH SELIGSON discusses this new life stage and how to navigate it. 

SC:  Maybe you could start by describing what it means to be "A Little Bit Married" (ALBM).

HS:  Sure.  So today there's a stop-gap between dating and marriage and it’s a place where a lot of young people are forming relationships that have many similarities to marriage.  This is where we have the life stage of “A Little Bit Married.”   It’s a no man’s land and it’s hard to know exactly what to do when you're living with someone or you’re making big career compromises or you’re doing things that sixty or seventy years ago would have likely culminated in marriage.  It can be very confusing.  So I wrote this book to try to help people navigate this life stage, but also to put it on the map as a trend and a romantic rite of passage that we all need to be paying attention to. 

SC:  Did the study target a specific demographic? 

HS:  The people who are a little bit married are mostly college educated, upwardly mobile young people living in urban environments. 

SC:  So people who come to SoulCycle would likely recognize this trend? 

HS:  Yes!  They might know people who are a little bit married or be parents or friends of ALBMs.  It’s very much a NY phenomenon. 

SC:  Young people today seem to have very high standards.  They spend a long time looking for “the one.”  Is this a new trend? 

HS:  People get married now for very different reasons than they used to.  Forty or fifty years ago,people got married for economic reasons since women didn’t work outside the home.  And it was too risky to have sex outside of marriage because there wasn’t birth control.  So now there's  a whole different structure and paradigm for why people get married:  now it’s for love and compatibility.  And so the stakes are really high.  Now people want a career counselor, someone who can last in a SoulCycle class with them, someone they’re super attracted to.  There are very high expectations because marriage means something different.

SC:  At some point, should people just settle for what they've got?  

HS:  My point isn’t that people should settle or that they shouldn’t have high expectations, but just that it's something that's coloring the dating landscape.  People ask themselves, “Is this person right for me?  How will I know?  She doesn’t like to scuba dive.  Or he likes to go to SoulCycle and I don’t – does that mean we’re not compatible?”  Now that we get married to fulfill our own needs and wishes, it’s created a lot of expectation around that.  

SC:  A lot of the book focuses on women wanting to get married and men not being ready.  Why do you think there is that gender divide?  Is that something that might change over time? 

HS:  I was really hoping when I wrote this book that I would find that there were tons of men chomping at the bit, dying to get married and there girlfriends were like, “Sorry.”  But here’s the reality:  the majority of men want to get married, but there is a marital readiness gap.  Women are usually ready to get married before men.  There are a lot different reasons for that, namely, we have a different arc to our lives than men do.  There are also economic factors because men want to feel like they’re in a certain financial place before they get married.  I don’t think there’s any research that shows that men don’t want to get married, it’s just a matter of timeframe. 

SC:  You say that men want to feel financially stable before they propose.  Do you think the recession will affect the readiness gap?  Will it now take men even longer to propose? 

HS:  I wrote the book before the recession started, but now it’s something that I plan to talk about more.  There are two factors of the recession that are impacting a little bit marrieds.  One, more and more couples are moving in together to save money so we’re seeing a rise in cohabitation.  And two, now you have bankers that can’t afford big rocks for their girlfriends.  I think that’s another factor in why people are delaying marriage, because they just can’t afford it.  Especially in places like NY where weddings are a competitive sport and everyone wants to outdo the other person. 

SC:  Did you find that women also wanted to be secure financially and in their careers before getting married or is that mostly a male phenomenon? 

HS:  It’s definitely not just a male phenomenon.  I think women want to be on their financial feet before they get married and today they don’t think of a guy as a financial plan.  All of that being said I still think that there are gender roles and norms that people still subscribe to.  One of which is that women don’t necessarily factor in that they might be the sole breadwinner.  And it isn’t that they think their wife won't work, but they want to feel like they could be the sole provider if they had to.  So it’s sort of degrees of magnitude we’re talking about. 

SC:  Is there any indication of how ALBMs will affect divorce rates? 

HS:  We know from the data and the research that delaying marriage has a positive impact on marriage.  There have been studies that show that people who get married very young have higher divorce rates than people who get married after their mid-twenties.  The researchers concluded that the marriage did better when people were financially secure and emotionally secure.  There’s a crude saying that goes, “The best marriage advice is don’t be poor.”  Through that lens you might say that ALBM might actually help lower the divorce rate.  I think that our generation takes marriage very very seriously and we want to get it right.  We’re a generation that saw our parents get divorced so we’ll do everything in our power not to make that happen again.  I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think this period really does help couple decide whether they should walk down the aisle or out the door and if they walk down the aisle then they’re making the right choice. 

SC:  In some ways ALBMs are really breaking from tradition, but then they still believe things like the man needs to propose or you have to get married before 30.  Do you think we’ll always have these very traditional views of marriage? 

HS:  I hope not.  But there are these cultural pressures and female biology does play into them.  This is the first generation in history with so much equality between the sexes.  It’s unprecedented.  This generation could decide to rewrite the script, but right now there’s still a lot of adherence to traditional gender norms.  My soapbox in the book is, "Ladies, stop pining after diamond rings and create some equality in the proposal process.”  The more we buy into the consumer culture of weddings we’re perpetuating these stifling gender norms.  I think gender roles are changing more on the household front in terms of  how men and women split housework or who brings home the bacon.   But with the wedding march, not so much. 

SC:  How do you think gender roles would change if women’s biological clocks weren’t a consideration? 

HS:  I think one point that really needs to be made is that men have a biological clock too.  A lot of the infertility issues that women have after the age of 35 are actually a result of the men.  But to answer your question, I do think it would push marriage back even more.  But then that gets to the issue of “Why get married?”  

SC:  You use a term called the “child-man” to describe the guy who wants to hang out with his guy friends and play video games all day.  He doesn’t want to grow up.  Can women change the child-man or should they try to find someone more mature? 

HS:  Well I think there are two iterations of the child-man.  One iteration is a guy who says, “Yeah, I’m not interested in meeting any milestones of adulthood anytime the next 10 years.”    And then there’s another version, where he’s a child-man now, but he’s eventually interested in settling down.  So I don’t think that it’s always the death sentence for a relationship, but it also depends on what you want.  The tension with the child-man is when you want something that he’s not capable of giving. 

SC:  It seems like we do a lot of things as a culture without thinking about why we’re doing them  and it seems like your advice throughout the book is just to be more thoughtful when it comes to relationships and to talk about these issues. 

HS:  During my research, I came across a term called "the tumble effect," which describes why many couples live together.  They both happen to have leases that are up and so they decide move in, which is not the best way to start a living arrangement.  Communication is not such a revolutionary point when it comes to relationships, but I think what is new and important is that this is totally unchartered territory and there are a lot of issues that come with it.  It used to be that you just date a guy and it was obvious that he was going to propose to you.  And today there’s not even a formal dating structure.  It’s like the wild wild west.