Your post makes me think a few random thoughts of my own, and as I still don't have much time and it's easier to wade in here than with kuru right now, let me just throw them out:

1. Americans seem marriage happy in general. I don't really know how it is for men, but no matter what I might say about school, work, whatever, people always want to know about my boyfriends, and if I do admit to having a significant other, people always want to know when we are getting married.
2. When it became obvious that I really wasn't that determined to get married, there was a lot of pressure to get me married, and I was not able to fend it off until I said that I absolutely, positively do not want to get married while my children are still living at home and then stated all of the reasons why I think that to do otherwise would be bad for my children and bad for a marriage. Once they move out, I expect the pressure again, and the pressure is still exerted by the men that I date, which can get pretty ugly pretty quick.
3. The thing I liked best about being married was the social respectability it gave me. The change was immediate and radical. As soon as I was married, I was a member of "the club," and both men and women responded accordingly. As soon as I wasn't again, I lost friends, and my work relationships with married men became a lot more awkward.
4. Men don't necessarily behave the same way with other people that they do with the women they are dating. If a woman is giving her boyfriend fits about why he hasn't popped the question, she will commiscerate with her friends, and they will all extend sympathy for the problem. I seriously doubt that any of the men who tried to pressure me into marriage shared that with their friends, and if they did, I doubt their friends did anything but laugh at them.
5. One of the complaints that I've heard conservatives cite with regard to socialist Sweden is how content Swedish women are to raise children outside of marriage, given that they have no economic incentive to marry, and of course they like to tweak the tax code to "encourage" marriage in the U.S. Northern Europeans just don't share our obsession with marriage, and that has been one of the big fears about allowing the U.S. to move further along that path.
6. One of my best friends is getting married this fall, I am in the wedding party, and the preparations are already driving me crazy, but I will never, ever show anything but total excitement about the wedding or the preparations or anything associated with it because my friend is very, very happy and she deserves to be happy. I pray that she will continue to be as happy as she is now for a long time to come.
7. She approached the whole idea of marriage very methodically. She decided she wanted to get married and then began looking and received a marriage proposal from a man she had known for years in a matter of months. It only took as long as it did because she shut him down every time he tried to talk about love or marriage too early. He is a very nice man who clearly adores her, and the only things that frighten me about her marriage are how quickly they are both jumping into it and her obvious determination to pair me up as well.

So very random thoughts, and really the only reason we are discussing all of this now is because Logical insisted that marriage is a horrible deal for men, not so for women. I think marriage is what you make it - whether you are male or female - but you really need to be careful about who you are marrying because it's very hard to recover from a bad marriage - whether you are male or female.