{"id":4352,"date":"2023-08-02T15:17:44","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T15:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/strongermarriages\/?p=4352"},"modified":"2023-08-02T15:17:44","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T15:17:44","slug":"author-argues-singles-should-treat-dating-like-a-marriage-job-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/strongermarriages\/2023\/08\/author-argues-singles-should-treat-dating-like-a-marriage-job-interview.html","title":{"rendered":"Author Argues Singles Should Treat Dating Like a Marriage Job Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_4361\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4361\" style=\"width: 768px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-4361\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/413\/2023\/08\/dating-to-marry-credit-pexels-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"dating\" width=\"768\" height=\"576\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4361\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Pexels.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>An author and mother urges single people not to treat dating lightly and instead like a serious process that demands being as transparent as possible about their future plans.<\/p>\n<p>In the wake of the divorce of Hollywood couple Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara, which seems to be related in part to the 46-year-old Manganiello\u2019s desire to be a father, in her new column, Bethany Mandel said it\u2019s tragic that he may have missed out on fatherhood due to him and Vergara\u2019s possible differences on the all-important question of having children.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/pagesix.com\/2023\/07\/20\/joe-manganiellos-desire-to-have-kids-led-to-sofia-vergara-divorce-source\/\"><em>Page Six <\/em>reported<\/a> that Vergara already has one son from a previous marriage and was embroiled in a custody battle with a former beau over frozen embryos from IVF treatment in 2013. The tabloid added that Manganiello, known for his work on HBO\u2019s \u201cTrue Blood,\u201d wanted to have children, and their split was mainly due to that difference.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thespectator.com\/topic\/date-marry-fun-life-partner-kids\/\">Mandel wrote<\/a>, \u201cA lot of things are important in a marriage: love, respect, trust, laughter. But perhaps most important is to remember that it\u2019s a partnership for life; and as such, dating should not be considered fun, but instead like a job interview for the most important role you\u2019ll ever have, that of a spouse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She also cited a recent \u201cToday\u201d column from author Bianca Turetsky, who\u2019s frozen her eggs and pays a high fee to keep them in storage despite knowing she\u2019ll almost certainly never become a mother because her husband doesn\u2019t want kids. In the piece, Turetsky noted that her previous boyfriend, who already had kids, waited years to reaffirm that he didn\u2019t want to have any more, leaving her heartbroken.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Qb1y6EB3Q-Y\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In her column, she wrote that part of growing up was realizing you can\u2019t get everything you want, but Mandel immediately rejected that idea. She wrote, \u201cShe deserved more than settling. She deserved a man who wouldn\u2019t help her with IVF injections to freeze her eggs but instead set her free to meet a man who would want to fertilize them himself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She continued, \u201cAnd yet, these are the literal proposals that Turetsky and (perhaps) Manganiello agreed to when they decided to marry people who wanted fundamentally different things out of life. It doesn\u2019t mean their spouses were wrong; just wrong\u00a0for them.\u00a0I don\u2019t know, though. Maybe they were also wrong. It\u2019s cruel and unethical to waste someone\u2019s precious time if you know you won\u2019t want the same thing; you don\u2019t get those years of fertility back.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Comparing the process\u00a0to a job interview, Mandel relayed a previous relationship she had with someone who recognized early on that the two had different paths in mind; they\u2019re now happily married to other people \u2013 him with two children and her with six. Mandel has frequently written about the joys and challenges of her large family.<\/p>\n<p>She asked, \u201cIf you were interviewing for a job, would you allow the process to drag on, long after you know it\u2019s the right fit (or not)? Would you take the job (AKA get married) if you weren\u2019t in agreement about what you both wanted out of the partnership?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An author and mother urges single people not to treat dating lightly and instead like a serious process that demands being as transparent as possible about their future plans. In the wake of the divorce of Hollywood couple Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara, which seems to be related in part to the 46-year-old Manganiello\u2019s desire&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":657,"featured_media":4361,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20,23],"tags":[19,33],"class_list":["post-4352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dating","category-relationships","tag-dating","tag-marriage"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Author Argues Singles Should Treat Dating Like a Marriage Job Interview<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Bethany Mandel, an author and mother, recently wrote a column where she says that singles should treat dating like a job interview for marriage.\" \/>\n<meta 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