I met my now ex-husband when we were both seniors in high school. We waited two years to get married, I was 19 and he was 20. We were both working full time and I was trying to go to school, we thought we were both very mature… We had almost four very rocky years before I caught him cheating on me with one of his co-workers.
My best friend’s daughter is getting married in a couple of weeks. I think they’re both 22. She’s finishing up school this year and he’s active duty military. I don’t know her fiance at all, haven’t had the chance to meet him since he’s mostly been deployed overseas. I’m hoping they have a better outcome than I did. I keep thinking that they’re too young to get married but then I have to remind myself that they’re older than I was!
I think getting married to someone without living together for at least a year first is just nuts, but adults get to make their own mistakes. Odds are the marriage is not going to turn out well since there are a lot of factors against it - lack of life experience, one partner has divorced before, short time from meeting to marriage. But that doesn’t really matter, because you’re not going to change his mind, and if you do he’ll just do the same thing with the next girl to come along. He will just have to make the mistake to (hopefully) learn from it, or maybe he’ll be one of the rare lucky people that doesn’t end up in a disaster.
If you have ever actually encountered a relationship, especially one that involves a person who’s already had a divorce, that has no problems pop up at all, you should document it very well and let social scientists the world over investigate this unprecedented occurrence. People have problems with other people, especially people that they spend all day around, it’s just the way the world works. Successful relationships sort out these problems, and some long-lasting relationships just bury them, but they’re there.
I don’t think you can draw meaningful conclusions from the fact people got married a little or long time after they met. Age is a more objective thing, your brain is still physically developing in your teens, at least.
For people in a given social context and generation maybe. But not once you’re comparing people of different social, religious, cultural etc backgrounds or across generations.
We got engaged around 6 weeks after meeting, married 6 months after meeting, didn’t live together, hadn’t lived totally independently (not counting ‘away’ college though that’s more independent than not having lived outside your parents’ home at all), very limited dating experience on both sides, though not super young: best decision in my life looking back 35 yrs. We were naive sure, but have basically been able to remain that way since nobody’s ever been cruel to either of us in love.
In the opening story the specific difficult/odd personality of the groom sounds dicey. But a lot of people aren’t that easy to get along with. All depends seems to me if the two sides, especially bride in this case since she knows what it’s like for her marriage to fail, size the other one up correctly intuitively. Maybe you can take more time and size the person up by level headed fact gathering, but that’s the part I’m not sure is really true. Everyone’s personal experience creates biases though.
Also some people would view it as obsolete to expect marriages to last for life anyway and therefore freak out at the possibility of divorce, especially not even your own. I emphasize this is not my personal view, I think divorce is a big deal. But the view that you have to seriously date and break up with lots of people first, then know ‘the one’ for a long time and live with them first to be ‘sure’ the marriage will be for life is itself out of date for some people; the importance attached to marriage being for life part of it I mean.
From the context (the person was discussing ways to sabotage the marriage), I inferred that they meant very major problems, not just problems in general.
The fiance’s marriage was annulled, she did not divorce; this to me is a good sign that she won’t let an unhappy marriage continue. A failed relationship doesn’t mean a person’s a failure w/ relationships, or few people would still be married. Plus, we have only the biased uncle’s POV, who doesn’t know what happened in the first marriage and merely assumes she was at fault b/c he feels that being older and having married before means she’s to blame for his nephew’s actions now and in the future. Her aunt may be somewhere sharing similar concerns about the nephew, steeped in her own ignorant bias about their relationship.
The nephew’s complete lack of experience in relationships is a HUGE red flag. He sounds sheltered and there’s a chance that realizing a compromise has to be found for things big and small could be a looming challenge.
I think my grandparents were about the same. Grew up in Charleston, WV and eloped to Ohio as the marriage laws were less tight.
It was funny as hell as none of us grandkids really thought about this until I asked at a dinner prior to a major Anniversary celebration “Did y’all ever do the math on our 89 and 91 year-old grandparents having their seventy-fifth anniversary?”
How young is young? I married my wife when we were 24 and 19 respectively, and 23 years later we’re happier than ever. Six-week courtship, but it really could have been shorter, we just waited an extra two weeks or so before making the engagement “official” so we wouldn’t seem too hasty.
All these stories of young marriages that lasted are interesting, but I thought we knew here: “anecdotes are not data”.
Real evidence is statistics on marriages.
Marriages before age 20 are twice as likely to end in divorce.
Marriages between age 20-24 are 3 times as likely to end in divorce.
While that’s true, she’s not demonstrating that she’s learned anything by jumping into her 2nd marriage after just a few weeks of dating. If she’s level-headed and just made a mistake the first time, I would expect her to really want to take her time before getting married again. I hope they can make it, but they certainly have a lot of strikes against them.
Since you don’t know a thing about what went on in that marriage nor the reasons for annulment, you’re just applying your own biases as much as the OP. You have no idea what it was she needed to learn.
This couple isn’t marrying until September, nearly a year after they started to date. That’s more than a few weeks and is as long if not longer than nearly every 50 years+ married couple in my family knew each other before marrying.
There are no guarantees in any relationship except the outside and uninformed judgment of others.
A marriage ending in what is legally a divorce, but called an annullment within the particular church counts as a divorce in my book. It’s a sign that she’s been divorced at least once, and if you look at stats on marriage the chance of divorce is much, much higher if one of the parties has been divorced before (regardless of whether a church prefers to pretend that it just didn’t happen). I never made any claim remotely like ‘a failed relationship means the person’s a failure with relationships’, that’s absurdly absolute and obviously untrue even though it’s not actually clear what ‘failure’ specifically means.
If you meant that, you should have said that. I inferred that they meant any significant problems, not just ‘some extremely unlikely problems that are so major you don’t expect anything like them in most relationships’.
They belong to a Protestant church.
Protestant churches do not annul. It would only have been a legal, civil annulment. There is no church pretending her marriage didn’t happen. An annulment is not the same thing as a divorce, which could be characterized a a failed marriage while an annulment cannot. She has not been divorced, not even once.
I would really enjoy reading the statistics you have at hand about annulments.
But we also should all know that ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’, and social data is often full of correlations mistaken for causation.
As I said before, you can show that people’s brains actually change from their teens to twenties so at some point down the age scale that itself is ‘real evidence’. And one person in this OP case is only 20.
But, once you get further along you could have stuff like for example working class people marrying earlier because they aren’t busy in college or starting a ‘career’. But being working class or working poor is probably also itself a detriment to stable marriage. And there are plausible reasons why that class status might cause marital instability (more economic uncertainty, govt benefits competing better with spouses as [co-]providers, etc) not just correlate with it.
For example my wife and I further than short courtship (though not all that young, 26/24, at marriage), are in a category of national match up with a very high divorce rate. But that match up in people our age tended to have particular social characteristics that don’t apply in our case. Applying social stats as ‘odds’ at the individual level is tricky at best, like ‘your chance of being murdered is X based on national stats’ (nonsensical in that case, those stats are way too skewed for the national average to be a useful predictor for individuals). And not just because there’s no certainty in future outcomes. But because of the difficulty of controlling social stats for variables other than the one you’re looking at.
Utter crap. I don’t blame her and while I think both are being stupid I don’t believe either one is to “blame.” Or, perhaps more accurately, both are equally to blame. Perhaps you can direct me to any statement where I indicated I blamed my nephew’s fiancé for his actions or the breakup of her first marriage. In this entire thread all I’ve said about her is:
I know nothing about her first marriage and indeed she’s said almost nothing about it to anyone else in the family—although I assume (perhaps I simply hope?) that she’s talked to my nephew about it. The only comment she’s ever made about it led my SIL (nephew’s mom) to believe it was abusive. As I said she’s giving off a weird vibe but I can’t put my finger on it. She seems very needy, but part of that may stem from the fact that she has little income and cannot drive, so asks my nephew to do everything for her.
This, a thousand times over.
On their wedding day they will have known each other for ten months and they will have been dating for, if my math is right, 7 months and 3 weeks.
An annulment is most certainly always a failed marriage. I know it’s supposed to signify that the marriage wasn’t a marriage, but still, it would be ridiculous to pretend that you have a piece of paper proving nothing happened. I can just imagine the document:
Annulment just means the reason the marriage failed may have been unusual.
As far as an annulled marriage’s effect on a person’s future, it could be totally inconsequential, or disastrous, or anywhere in between.
I got married at 22, my wife 20. I had a fairly forced proposal after 2 months (she homesick and talking about moving back home if our relationship didn’t progress), and got married at 6 months.
We’re still together 24 years later. It hasn’t been all roses, but it hasn’t been all terrible either.
If I got shot back in time to before I met her, and knew that my family was safe and happy in an alternate timeline with an alternate me, I would have told her if she couldn’t wait any longer, I’d hate it, but she could leave. I wanted financial stability and some extra time to know myself before getting married. I would do a lot of things differently honestly.
Who knows what will happen? I’m formerly Mormon, and everyone gets married insanely young. It’s often expected for young men to completely their missions at 20 or 21 and then look to get married before finishing school. Young women will often date “returned missionaries” at 18 or 19.
Courtships are quick. It’s fairly common for couples to get engaged within four to six weeks of starting dating and then married within six months of first meeting.
Within a community where that’s the expectation, them it can work. However, there are a lot of unhappy marriages as well.
All that ‘bad/strange/unexplainable, etc feeling’ you’ve spouted is your bias showing since you have literally no provable basis for it. If you can’t see it, which you clearly can’t, then yeah, my pointing it out to you seems like utter crap. Happily, this biased rant of yours is just you shouting into the wind, b/c the couple will rise and fall on their own w/o your uninformed opinion nagging at them (unless you do something incredibly rude before the wedding out of an overblown sense of entitlement).
My comment about it not being weeks before they get married is directed at a another poster, not you. Doing the math so exactly shows that you’re a teensy bit obsessed; maybe thinking of positive ways to present a great example of a successful marriage will take your mind off mentally betting against them b/c you have a feeling about her.