Emma Watson, 35, says the pressure on young people to get married by a certain age does more harm than good.
During an appearance on Wednesday’s episode of Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast, Watson spoke about her views on marriage and pushed back against the expectation that it should happen on a deadline.
“I’m just so happy not to be divorced yet,” Watson told podcast host Shetty. “Like that sounds like a really negative answer, but I think that we’re being pressured and forced into this thing that I believe is a kind of miracle.”
The “Harry Potter” actor said that this social pressure is “the least romantic thing I can possibly think of.” Had she tried to marry when she was younger, she added, “it would have been carnage.”
“I just didn’t know myself well enough yet. I didn’t have a clear enough idea of what my purpose, my vision, like how I was going to be of service. I didn’t know where I really felt like I needed to be,” Watson said.
She added that it’s unfair to tie a person’s self-worth to their marital status.
“I think it’s such a violence, and it’s such a cruelty on people — especially young people, I think, and especially women — to make them feel like they have no worth or like they haven’t succeeded yet in life because they haven’t forced to its culmination something that I just don’t think can or should ever be forced,” Watson said
Pressuring people to marry too soon ignores how much work is required to build a lasting relationship, she said.
“I have really sat with myself in a lot of discomfort and asked myself a lot of very difficult questions to be at that point. It hasn’t happened to me yet,” she added.
A representative for Watson did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.
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Watson isn’t alone. Other female celebrities have also spoken about wrestling with the same expectations around marriage.
During a 2017 appearance on “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen,” Kim Kardashian said her 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries was partially influenced by the societal pressure to settle down.
“At the time, I just thought, ‘Holy shit, I’m 30 years old. I’d better get this together. I’d better get married,'” Kardashian said. “I think a lot of girls do go through that, where they freak out thinking they’re getting old and all their friends are having kids. So, it was more of that situation. But I knew on the honeymoon it wasn’t going to work out.”
In a July 2025 interview, Tracee Ellis Ross called out the pressure on women to marry and said her mother, Diana Ross, taught her to embrace the joy of being alone.
“[My mom] didn’t build the wealth she has, she didn’t build the career she made because of a man. The example that was set for me [was] that I didn’t need a man to build the life I wanted,” Ross said.
More people are choosing to get married later in life. Based on US Census data, the median age to marry in 2024 for the first time was 30.2 for men and 28.6 for women, up from 23.2 and 20.8, respectively, in 1970.
Marriage aside, Gen Z in particular is delaying many traditional milestones of adulthood, from having children to even getting their driver’s licenses.
