Your post made my day. You hit on so many points that it’s hard to answer.
My only suggestion is to pray for a wife if you are not already doing it. The Lord knows how to bring the right one to you.
I am 40 now and experienced the same observations in church youth groups and college in the ’98-’06 era. It was always worse in metro areas like Raleigh/Chapel Hill …. Affluent young women—in church, yes— for whom money seemed the background measure of all worth. They saw all guys through that filter.
What this environment is doing to young men and women is prolonging adolescence… not making one “ready for” children, home, marriage, etc. Your timeline description is spot-on. The society and the church both lend credence to the idea that one must do all these things before thinking about (fill in the blank).
Of course, this pushes those realizations into the mid/late 30s for most people. And despite the world’s rejection or ignorance of God’s sexual standards, this mentality also tells young Christians that they should endure 10-15 years of celibacy while achieving all the things that make them “ready for” …. Or maybe just adopt the pagan world’s behavior in the meantime (?? Many are muddled or silent on the issue). This is a setup for failure on both fronts.
I know so many people who are now in their mid-30s, with degrees (many Masters), unmarried, childless, non-homeowners, etc. who are no more ready or mature than me at 18. Sure, many will probably marry at some point and have their statistical 1.6 children. Maybe they’ll even be better off financially in some cases.
But they either won’t have, or will long-delay, the hard-to-experience-but-needful reality that marriage and family typically bring to young people and society: It forces you to live outside of yourself and die to your self-interest. All the inward, naval-gazing mental angst I experienced when younger just kind of went away and were forgotten as my problems became how to care for others.
Thank you for your helpful and thoughtful reply. It uncovers a corollary church-problem: this doctrine of ‘preparing’ endlessly, and never being ‘ready’ to actually go do the thing. Churches love to say they are “equipping” people. But they love to repeat how much people “need” “preparing” and ‘equipping’ and ‘education’ and so while doing that they are to “wait on the Lord”. And so you have all these women who are “equipping” themselves, and each day their own-view of their own spiritually-superior-status just rises and rises, because now they are REALLY “equipped”, right? And so the expectation of the “God’s Best” husband just keeps rising as well... after all HE should be “equipping himself” as much as she-has “equipped” herself at BIble study and...and...and...