Quote:
Originally Posted by marriedPNM
I did not mean marriage itself is dumb, just that it is a dumb reason to not consider someone as a quality PNM.
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I respect your point, but actually marriage would be a really sticky situation on certain campuses and a perfectly valid reason to give pause in considering an otherwise great PNM.
As a
general rule of thumb, campus culture is going to be reflected in the Greek system. If you attend a school with a high proportion of married/older/otherwise nontrad. women, you're probably going to see chapters with a large number of these women as well. However, it's likely going to be a very different scenario if you attend a school where like 99% of undergrads are 18-23 and unmarried.
Here's the deal, and please bear with me as this isn't personal. My campus -- and Greek system -- was highly traditional as are many campuses in the South. The entire time I was there I only encountered TWO nontraditional (i.e. married) students, and neither were interested in sororities. Greek life, at my school, was highly structured around a "typical" student -- the events, meetings, activities, philanthropy were often scheduled starting in the early evenings and potentially going late at night. This kind of schedule is incredibly intense during your new member period.
So if I'm a nineteen year old member of a sorority, and I meet a married woman coming through recruitment, red flags are going to go up all over the place: "Is she going to be able to commit to activities that last all night when she has a husband at home? Is she going to be able to participate in weekend activities or is she going to have take care of household business? What if she decides to have a baby and drops out of the sorority? Is she going to make time to hang out at the chapter house sans husband? Will she tell her husband our ritual? I barely had time for anything else during my new member period -- let alone a husband, so how is this going to work?" etc. etc.
Please note that I don't have these ingrained notions about married women (I'm getting married myself, as it were), so I'll reiterate that this is nothing personal against you and I'm sure you're serious when you say you'd be a great member of a sorority. Honestly, though, it's all about the actives' perception of your committment ability. You can talk until you're blue in the face but still be seen as a committment risk. For the same reason that highly competitive chapters wouldn't bid ANYONE they saw as a committment risk, you might run into some problems.
And AlphaGamUGA has a point. As much as I dislike this mode of thinking, we have to look at the average college freshman or sophomore woman. If you're the only married woman they've ever really encountered at their school, they're going to have a knee-jerk reaction to it: "She's married? I don't know anyone else that's married and my age. That's so foreign to me, I can't relate to that. She's so different. That's so weird."
Immature? Yeah. Reality? Yeah.
But -- and this is my party line to anyone in a sticky recruitment situation -- you'll never really know until you try. Nobody knows what your campus is, and we could be totally wrong even though it's located in The South. If you can be comfortable with the fact that your marital status might, MIGHT be detrimental, then by all means -- go through recruitment. At the very least, you'll have some fun and meet some new people.
Hybrid Mode
