Early Marriages

The BBQ Pit
1

This is mainly inspired by friends of mine, but also the number of references I come across on this board to people who say, “my husband” or “my wife” and then, in another context, mention still being an undergrad or not knowing where to move for a job because their wife is still in college or simply giving an age that is more appropriate to a fine wine than a married-couple’s average number of years.

Now, everyone knows the exception to the rule: the high-school sweetheart couple that rode together on the bus, went to prom, got married at age 20, and remained happy and content for the next 50 years. I’m not looking for personal anecdotes to this effect.

That being said, why, in ANYONE’S mind, is immediately getting married a GOOD idea? I get it. You’re young, you graduated college. You’re newly independent. You think you’re in love. You want to buy a bigass ring with your first job (or, if you’re a woman, you dream of the bigass ring that he’ll buy with his first job) and put a downpayment on a condo and live a little domesticated life. At 22. What is this, the 1950s?

And okay, okay, “if that’s what they want, and it’ll make them happy, why the hell shouldn’t they?” Well, how about because the person you are in your 20s is not the person you’ll be in your 30s or your 40s? How about because you need to give relationships room to grow? How about, just because you marry someone, doesn’t mean you’ll be “together forever”? How about, it’s just as easy to toy with and cheat on someone you’re married to as someone that you’re seriously dating? How about, you spend a couple years getting to know the person?

“Marriage is a sign of commitment”. Okay, that’s true too, but only in a shallow way. Living together is a sign of commitment, too, but that’s not “good enough”. Or just being with the person, entwining your lives, isn’t “good enough”. You need to MARRY. Let’s all get married! Honestly, it’s very desperate. If you’re getting married within a year of meeting someone, you don’t want the PERSON, you want to be MARRIED. If you loved the person, you’d be comfortable being in an unmarried relationship. If you’re not comfortable just being together for a few years, IMHO, it says something about your relationship.

I’m 25. I’ve had a long-term boyfriend for almost 2 years now. Honestly, if he asked me to marry him, I’d crack up laughing. I love him to death but I’m not ready to get married, and I know that he isn’t, either. I don’t even know if he’s the right one for me, and I’m not willing to make bets when I don’t have to! Why should I? He doesn’t want kids. I don’t want kids now, but I might decide I want kids in the future. He also doesn’t want to leave NYC. I don’t want to leave NYC now, either, but I might in the future. In other words, I’m not about to let a relatively “new” relationship (less than two years) dominate the things I’ve wanted for almost two decades, that I went to college to achieve, that I’ve been working for my entire life: i.e. a career, self-development, self-initiative, personal growth, etc.

I have friends, also early and mid-twenties, who are all getting married to people they just met. A year. A little less. Maybe a little more. Shucks, I mean, I’m happy for them if they’ve found a comfortable relationship, but I think getting MARRIED at this point is a BAD, STUPID IDEA. But you can’t tell people that. Once they’ve decided, they’ve decided. And I feel like this not only sets many of them up for a more limited future, ties them all the tighter to people they’ve really only begun to know, but it erodes the idea of marriage into something done on the fly, on a whim, without thought. Maybe this has been the case all along, but my argument is that these are people who consider themselves otherwise sane, rational, considered human beings. It’s artificial, trying to speed up the process of falling in love. Loving someone GROWS. It doesn’t just APPEAR. And, like I said before, simply being married doesn’t CREATE more love. A marriage certificate won’t make a relationship STRONGER, and it won’t make it last any longer in a natural way- only in an unnatural way, in that you’d scrape the bottom of the emotional barrel a little bit because you’ll have more to lose, in a practical way, when it ends.

And I blame our culture for touting marriage as the end-all be-all of personal development. Marriage has become a “goal”. Not, “find the right person”, but “get married”. And, if you’re married, it’s just taken for granted that you’ve found the right person, that you’re “all set”. Well, if statistics have anything to say, at least a third of the time, this isn’t so.

I know I don’t sound open-minded, but I feel depressed for everyone I love who is jumping on this bandwagon. It’s what I consider an awful, bad-around idea, and yet everyone seems to be gung-ho about it. I’m only putting this in the pit because I can’t phrase, “this is a stupid decision” in a nicer way. And yes. 90% of the time, regardless of your “personal circumstances”, getting married very early in a relationship is a stupid decision.

So, can anyone actually DEFEND getting married so early, after knowing someone for such a short amount of time, or even right out of college? Why get MARRIED instead of just living together or being in a relationship for a little while? (I’m not talking about religious reasons either- while similarly absurd, IMHO, that’s an entirely different topic.)

2

I’m going to grant that my example is a corner case, but it’s one legitimate reason to get married, IMNSHO.

The military does not make any accommodations for persons who are in informal personal arrangements. That is your live-in squeeze cannot be included on your health care (I knew one guy who felt he basically had to go career when his wife was diagnosed with lupus, just because of pre-existing condition clauses.), the military won’t notify them of your wounding or death in a timely manner, since that is something that only goes to family members, likewise we could be talking about the mother of your children, and if she drops dead the military feels no obligation to forward that news to the service member in a timely manner.

Similarly, housing allowances, separation pay, and spousal support all mean that married persons in the military get more cash than single persons. (At the time of my service I don’t believe that the increases were enough to offset the increased expenses, but they were an attempt to make it possible to be a single income household.)

So, there are financial and other incentives to get married if one of the two persons are in the military, and planning on living together anyways.
ETA: Whether this is a wise course of action, is another question altogether.

3

There’s no need to defend early marriage. Nor is there a need to tout it.

I’d bet that marriages work, or fail, just as much in cases of early marriage as in cases of later marriage.

Hey, my dad was still in law school when he got married (and when I was born). My mom and dad were happily married until her death. And I’ve seen more than one marriage between people in their thirties or even forties fail.

4

Sounds like someone’s biological clock is ticking… :wink:

As one of these “early marriage” people, let me be the first to say you can go straight to hell. A hell full of neon wedding chapels and devils in frilly white dresses.

What gives you the right to decide the “correct” age for marriage any more than the people who are actually doing the marrying? I would say this is the lamest rant I’ve read in a long time, but then there’s a huge multipage D&D rant going on in Cafe Society right now. So congratulations, you are not quite the lamest person on the board in the last few weeks… but you’re close.

5

This could be true ten years from now. People are always changing. If you use this as a criterion for not getting married, then you’ll probably never get married.

Obviously you shouldn’t get married now, if you feel a marriage would dominate everything else. I think people should get married only when they can be sure that it won’t thwart either person’s goals. Don’t let your friends’ marriages bother you so much; if they are bad decisions, they’ll probably figure it out soon enough. The first sign is when they stop spending any time with friends, but this happens to couples who aren’t married, too.

It could be worse. In the past, and in other parts of the world today, it was common for people to get married in their teens (especially women). It was more of a business/social/political arrangement, so the sooner you got married, the better your prospects were. So take heart.

ETA:

Ah, so you want to run for president. Well, today you have to be married to get elected president. Sorry.

6

I think there is often that economic driver to early marriage. You are in love. You want to get married eventually. You live together, you are married in all but name - and only one of you gets a ‘real job’ out of college that includes health insurance.

(At 25, I’d make the decision about kids sooner or later - it isn’t a decision to hold off on until 35. I’d rather see a stable couple get married young and start having kids in their late 20s than a couple putz around for ten years, then discover that one of them really does want kids and one of them doesn’t - and for the one that does, breaking up, finding someone new and having kids are going to be project plan milestones difficult to hit - particularly if you are female or if you care about not teaching a scared six year old to ride a bike at 45. Or putting kids through college during your retirement years.)

7

Oh, so it’s better to have kids before you know whether you really want them or not? Let’s all err on the side of having kids! Great idea.

8

Fine. Don’t get married. Some of us, however do know that this is The One, and are willing to make the bet because we feel the odds are in our favour. Yes, I got married at 22, and I never thought I’d be a Mrs. this young. But I wanted to be with the man I loved, and had already committed to him before he even proposed. It was just the next logical step in our relationship.

You’re not ready. I was. We’re different. Go figure.

9

Yeah, but I think people make more drastic changes right out of school when they have to go about establishing themselves.

10

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m 25 and married so I’m a bit biased.

I’m troubled by your monolithic view of what person in his/her 20s wants or should want. We wanted to get married, we’re happy we got married. We’d been together for several years, and we knew we intended to stay together. We lived together for a year before we got married, and the day-to-day life is absolutely no different, but it’s nice to have made public our commitment to each other. Do you object to 23 year olds living togther? Why or why not, if you so violently object to them getting married? If we had put off getting married because we thought we were too young, and got married when we were, say, 29 I don’t think our future would be any different. That’s because we’re going to stay together, regardless of the particular year in which we made it official.

You say that the person you are in your 20s is not the person you are in your 30s and 40s. That’s very true. But the person you are in your 30s is different from the person you are in your 40s and 50s, and so forth. A good marriage allows both people to grow and change, as all people do over the decades. I hope my husband and I continue to grow as people, but I’m confident that we can keep it going. Again, I’m not convinced that our prospects for long-term happiness would have been any different if we had waited.

If I’m happy with my choices, what harm does it do you? Why are you so worked up about this?

11

How old are you now?

12

No, of course 23 year olds should live together. I just don’t know why people are so gung-ho about getting “married” within such a short time frame of meeting eachother. If you had been together “several years”, then that makes sense to me.

13

You’re pretty cranky about decisions other people make about their personal lives and which don’t effect you at all. What’s it to you, anyway?

This is just an anecdote, but I got married 7 months after I met my husband. Why? Because we wanted to. It didn’t occur to us to call you up and make sure you thought it was a acceptable idea (you were only 3 years old at the time, anyway).

14

22 (yeah, still newlyweds here. We got married back in May.) And? My point still stands. I had already decided that this was the man I wanted to spend my life with, and vice versa. We didn’t get married because it was ‘the thing to do’ (honestly, we’d rather have waited a bit longer, but that’s another rant entirely), but because we were both committed to each other in all the ways that matter–marriage changed nothing except making the arrangement formal.

If you think we rushed things–which is debatable–that’s your opinion. And if you want to wait, that’s fine with me. You can do things in the way you think is right for you. We got married because we felt it was right for us. And because US immigration sucks, but as I said, another rant entirely.

15

So, is your objection more to young people getting married, or to people getting married when they haven’t been dating very long?

Suppose a 30 year old married someone they’d been dating for less than a year. Would you argue that they just wanted to be married and didn’t care about the person?

16

I’m glad I was married and had my son in my mid 20’s. I’ll have lots and lots of time to enjoy my family as an adult, and I’ll get to be selfish again while I’m still young.

17

No, its better to make up your mind about whether or not you want kids before you get too much older. Don’t have them if you don’t want them, God no. But don’t think “I’m 25 and I don’t even know if I want kids” and believe that isn’t a big deal - statistically, you have three more years of peak fertility, and then its going to start dropping. Not to mention that the older you get, the more difficult it becomes to simply raise your kids while you are in good health - which as an adoptive parent I personally find to be a bigger deal than the fertility issues.

18

When I was a whippersnapper, long-term status didn’t accrue til the start of the third year.

19

I’m a bachelor who’s only come close to marrying once, when I was 40 (I’m 48). My current girlfriend is 46, divorced with two children, and has no interest in re-marrying, an arrangement I’m perfectly happy with. I was definitely not ready for marriage at 20.

My point in giving this background is to establish that I’m not a knee-jerk proponent of early marriage.

That said, things were less complicated when an 18-year-old man could earn enough to support a family. It made it easier to start a family when the mother was best able to handle childbirth, and both parents were capable of getting by on two hours sleep. These are biological facts, and they clash with the maturation schedules imposed by our modern society.

In a day and age where you have to get years of education and often spend a few more years spinning up in your career, there’s a conflict between the biologically optimum age to have kids and the age when people become mature, self-realized (and self-sufficient) adults.

My parents were much older than most (my mother was 42 when I was born, my father 66), so I was more aware of the problems faced by older parents than were most 20-year-olds.

While I don’t envy people who married young and regretted it, I have plenty of admiration for the sacrifice and determination of people who got married (and had kids) young, and made it work.

20

You have no idea.