To set the stage, both mein Herr and I are 45. In the midwest town we grew up in, girls were set on going to college and earning a degree before marriage, and any girl whose main goal was to be a wife and mother, with no extra education was pretty well looked down on. Go directly to McDonalds, do not pass ‘the good life’, do not collect a decent wage. I am a high school teacher, and lately I have been seeing a real trend toward girls getting married the summer after graduating from high school, and not really concerned about college. These are not girls that are barely making it through HS – they could go to college easily. I’m almost getting the feeling of…we don’t have a lot of time left, and we must get married soon. In my day, getting married at 26 - 30 was fine. Even my 19-yr. old is engaged, although we’re pushing for her to finish her degree before any more steps are taken. Has anyone else noticed this trend, or is it just me?
Okay, my brain is dead. I thought I was in IMHO. Could a mod move this, please?
All the statistics that I’ve seen indicate that the trend is moving the other way; marriage occurs later and later all the time. Of course that’s a national average and may not represent what’s happening everywhere.
Pigs are flying, I actually agree with ITR champion.
Are those statistics for all marriages or just first marriage? I think with divorces the all marriage age would increase. I’m 26 and I didn’t see any trend with the people I grew up with for getting married early and even in college I only had two weddings.
I do know a girl who entire goal in life is to have kids and she sees marriage as a prereq to that but she went to college and was married while she was in school.
I think it’s partly demographics. Unlike you, I grew up in a town where relatively few people went to college and a lot got married young. I graduated in a class of 300, and fewer than 10 went straight to 4-year colleges. Two years after graduation, most of my former classmates were either married or had children (usually not both). It’s not even a podunk little place or anything.
Right now it seems to me that a lot of people are waiting a bit longer than that to get married. But given my background, that might be hard to avoid.
I’m 26 and I’ve seen a lot of both. My fiancee is 23. My brother and his wife got married while in college; they were 20 and 21. My sister is engaged at 19 and in college. My other brother is 21 and is waiting to finish school to even begin dating.
FWIW, I can think of many girls I’ve known in the 2000s who became engaged while in college but broke things off before actually getting married. (Sometimes due to the realization that they had very different life goals and sometimes because the guy they thought was totally awesome at age 20 wasn’t really marriage material.) I wouldn’t take an early engagement as a sure sign of an early marriage.
Just from what I’ve seen, it seems that very religious young people, such as Mormons or Jehova’s Witnesses, do get married very young. I think it has a lot to do with being able to have sex, but of course none of them would admit it if you asked them.
Family demographer here. Generally, the statistic used for this sort of analysis is age at first marriage. To get a number for a population, you use median age a first marriage. In the US (and pretty much everywhere else in the industrialized world), this age has been increasingly steadily since the post-WWII period.
Here’s a table with data for the US.
:dubious: Wouldn’t they? Being Mormon myself,* I can tell you that we look forward to that part of marriage. But I think most sensible young people realize that it’s pretty stupid to get married just to have sex; you’re looking for a life partner, after all. We’re certainly more focused on family than more mainstream folks, too. My own crowd in college may have been slightly atypical–my female friends and I were uniformly wary of commitment and in no hurry to get married. Dangerdad was smart and didn’t mention the subject very soon. (We were 22 at the wedding; utterly average.)
My husband likes to tell about his mission president, who spoke to a crowd of 21-yo guys all hoping to go home and get married pretty soon, and said, “Always remember that you could be making the worst mistake of your life.”
*I should note here that my hometown, the one with all the kids who got married young, was not very full of Mormons. It was not the LDS kids I was thinking of.
Here’s a quick summary of the U.S. statistics on marriage and divorce. It is not true, as is sometimes claimed, that people in the 1890’s and earlier got married at a very young age. In fact, the average age at first marriage dropped from at least 1890 until the late 1950’s. At that point the average age began to go back up again. It wasn’t until 1990 that the average age at first marriage reached the level it was in 1890.
It is not true that the percentage of marriages ending in divorce is increasing these days. In general, the percentage of marriages ending in divorce went up slowly from 1890 to the early 1940’s. It then went down slowly from the early 1940’s to 1958. It then increased again very quickly until 1981. Since 1981, the percentage of marriages ending in divorce has slowly dropped.
The real change since 1981 is that the percentage of people getting married at all is slowly dropping.
We engaged at 19, married at just 20, and still managed to work while finishing college.
That was in the 60s. The marriage lasted 25 years, until the empty nest hit her hard.
I recall when I was a kid my mother said our nextdoor babysitter would never get married, because she was still unmarried at 23 and had missed her chance.
Well I think it depends. Mass kids tend to be waiting til they graduate college to get married…and I have to say I think that’s an awesome thing. You change SO much in your early twenties that it’s not even funny. I know SO many people who thought they were gonna be together who broke up beginning sr year, it’s not even funny.
My general sense is that it depends. People who live in rural and small-town areas who tend to be more conservative and traditional in their thinking tend to get married early. People who live in urban areas tend to get married later or not at all.
I don’t hang out with a lot of teenagers or early 20-somethings so I can only go by what I see in the media and MTV. It does seem there is a different mindset than there was 15 or so years ago when I was that age. Gen X was sort of known for being cynical about everything, getting on with life much later and for having a lot of non-traditional family-like living arangements (think Friends or the movie Singles).
Kids these days seem very different with their wholesome Miley Cirus and Jonas Brothers and whatnot. There are a lot more stories about young Hollywood moms.