Unmarried women with closed “windows of opportunity”: Professional women's reasons for not getting married

Studies conducted in many different countries suggest that marriage rates are falling. Factors to explain these trends include higher levels of economic freedom on the part of women, higher rates of divorce and partnering out of wedlock, individualization, and weakening of ties between having and raising children and marriage as an institution. Investigating the reasons for not marrying on the part of women is important in Turkey as a country where the institution of marriage is regarded as the only form of having children in a socially accepted way. The present study focuses on the experience of university graduates and professional women in the age interval of 35-50 who have never married. This qualitative, descriptive study draws upon 20 in-depth interviews to probe the reasons these women did not marry in order to examine whether this decision emerges as an individual solution to some structural problems. More generally, the article explores the contradictions between the socio-economic and cultural distances covered by women and the lack of change in gender roles.