No pressure to marry, UNC students say

As the cold weather melts away and warm feelings start to rise, social media sites are filled with images of engagements and love at the Old Well.

And as couples all around are committing to spend the rest of their lives with one another, upperclassmen might feel the pressure of a seasonal phenomenon known as “Ring by Spring.” 

The concept of “Ring by Spring” is simple: College students are attempting to find their lifelong partners and get an engagement or wedding ring by the spring of their senior year.

Married student housing

On campus, married students and students with children have the option to live together in the Baity Hill at Mason Farms apartment community. The community provides family-specific services and creates a family-oriented environment for students who choose to live at UNC with their partners or children. 

Monica Boswell, manager of Baity Hill, said the apartment community used to offer housing to engaged couples, but it no longer provides these services to newly engaged couples because they are looking to provide a family-oriented environment within the community. 

“We used to offer couples who were engaged, but that really wasn’t the intention of the property,” Boswell said. “We do have some people who are grandfathered in because that is what we used to do.”

Boswell and Rick Bradley, associate director of housing and residential education, said the housing department doesn’t maintain statistics on married couples taking advantage of Baity Hill’s services, but they do believe that the number of undergraduates at Baity Hill overall has risen. 

“Anecdotally, we have seen an increase in undergraduate students who are either single parents or are married students,” Bradley said.

But Bradley emphasized that though the number of undergraduates has risen at Baity Hill, there is no statistical evidence to prove whether or not this is related to the rise of engagements and marriages of university students.

Marriage research

Phil Morgan, sociology professor at UNC, said that when he was a university student, many people joked that women attended college to get their “MRS” degree, alluding to the idea that women sometimes went to school with the sole intention of finding a husband. 

Now, Morgan believes that trends are changing and that students are less likely to get married right after graduation, if they even get married at all.

“The most dominant thing in family formation in the U.S. is for people to postpone marriage and childbearing until later,” he said. “The other thing that is happening in the U.S. is that more and more people are cohabiting and fewer are marrying — and more people are not getting married ever.”

Morgan notes that there is a correlation between the education level of people and the time at which they get married, stating demographic trends suggest people with higher education are more likely to postpone marriage.

Lisa Pearce, associate professor of sociology at UNC, notes that though the “Ring by Spring” trend has been decreasing over time, there are still groups of people who fall into the category of looking for marriage right out of college. 

“People have different understandings of how they plan their future marriage to work or how they want their family life to unfold,” Pearce said.

Pearce noted that there are two common groups among young adults today when it comes to ideologies on what it means to get married: marriage planners and marriage naturalists.

Marriage planners meet the more modern trend, wherein young adults plan to get married eventually but are waiting for economic stability, emotional maturity or other factors they believe make them ‘adult’ enough to get married. Marriage naturalists meet trends more similar to those in the 1950s and 1960s, where the transition to married, adult life happens much earlier. 

Both Morgan and Pearce believe that some people still may have the mentality of “Ring by Spring,” but the rise in engagements and marriages that can be seen across the U.S. and around UNC’s campus has more to do with the warming weather than it does with demographic trends.

“We’re moving into springtime — springtime is when people get engaged and marriages are more common,” Morgan said. “It’s a spring phenomenon, but I bet it’s actually less likely than a decade ago, and a decade ago was less likely than two decades ago.”

Katy Folk and Danielle Martin

Junior Katy Folk’s engagement to Danielle Martin, a junior at George Washington University, appeared on the “Overheard at UNC” Facebook page on Jan. 24. 

“We knew we wanted to get married eventually,” said Martin. “We’re getting married two weeks after Katy graduates so that we can get started on the new paths of our lives.”

The couple notes that although their wedding will coincide with the end of their college careers, it is a matter of coincidence and economic convenience, rather than a necessity or a deadline.

Martin believes that some people her age do feel the pressure to get married, especially if they have been in a committed relationship for a long time.

“If you’re a senior and you’ve been in a relationship since freshman year, the spring feels like your deadline,” she said. “You’re either engaged by the spring or your relationship is ending.”

Yet, the couple believes societal pressures to get married have reduced for college-aged students.

“I think the average age of engagements and marriages has gotten older,” Folk said. “So, there’s not so much a drive to get engaged before you graduate.”

Although the couple believes the trend of marriages in college or directly after college has decreased, same-sex couples like Folk and Martin now have the opportunity to get married younger, whereas this was not possible historically.

“We are the first generation of same-sex couples who are able to go the more traditional route of getting engaged in college and getting married after college,” Folk said. “Nobody’s had that option before. So it’s exciting to be that first new wave.”

Kyle Leggett and Sara Eagle

Senior Air Force ROTC cadet Kyle Leggett met his now-wife Sara Eagle two years ago when the two served in the AFROTC together. 

“Even from the very beginning, I was very clear with her that I wasn’t going to pursue a relationship unless marriage was something that we would be going for,” he said. “It was on the table pretty much from the beginning.”

Eagle graduated from UNC in 2014. That, combined with her move to Texas for Air Force training, led to the couple’s decision that the summer was the best time for their wedding because it would mark a permanence in their relationship.

“We knew that with the Air Force it was going to take us apart for a while — we had to make a decision,” Leggett said. “We were either going to go all out with the relationship and we were really going to commit it to our faith and our beliefs, or not going for it at all.”

Leggett believes that although there is less pressure for people to get married in society, social media and interactions with peers around campus can cause some people to feel the pressure to get engaged or married while still in college.

“You tend to notice through Facebook or through social media that there is a certain sense of loneliness that people are trying to fulfill in some ways, and I would say that (“Ring by Spring”) is one goal that is kind of created,” he said. “It is something that still exists, but as more of an underlying issue.”

“There are similarities but it’s hard to see some of the similarities since so much has changed in the culture in 50 years.”

arts@dailytarheel.com