Early Marriages

The BBQ Pit
21

Yeah, NightRabbit, I totally agree.

Speaking of which, why in the world do we let poor people or people that haven’t finished college get married either? I say we make a law that you can’t get married unless you’re rich, you’ve graduated college, and you’re 22. But not over 24 because then the marriage stability declines again.

Oh, and also you have to be white, you can’t have a kid, you can’t have cohabitated. By the way, I guess that means you’re out of the pool of individuals worthy to ever be married.

Thank god we’ve got smart people like you around to tell us which relationships should and should not end in marriage.

22

I’m going on 35. The other day I saw some 25 year old guy on TV mention his wife, and I thought, “Good God, how can someone so young be married?” Then I realized that I got married at 23. :smack: 23 seems a lot older when you are 23 than it does when you’re 35 and looking at other people who are 23!

So I can kind of see where you’re coming from, and yes, people who get married to the first person they ever have a serious relationship make me cringe a bit - I don’t think it improves your odds of staying together, despite the fact that individual couples may do great.

But I think your reasons for marriage, your compatibility, and your attitudes about what marriage is are much more relevant in whether getting married is a good idea. People who get married because of social pressure, loneliness, or God help us, unplanned pregnancy are probably in trouble whether they marry at 22 or 42. Similarly, people who think marriage is an idealized state, and the minute you feel unhappy or have a problem means it’s time to get out are going to get divorced early and often.

(FWIW we moved in together after knowing each other a few weeks, he moved with me from CT to NC a couple months later, and we got married three years later. Then we waited six years before having a baby. In some ways I wish I’d skipped law school (mostly when I make my loan payment each month) and just started a family, but really I do think it was valuable to have a career of sorts before becoming a housewife.)

23

Gee, I was 29 (almost 30) when I married a man I’d been dating for 4 weeks. We met about 2 weeks before our first date. No living together, no getting-to-know-each-other. We just celebrated our 24th anniversary. I’m not sure I can agree with you.

My daughter is 22. She’s getting married in May, about 20 minutes after she graduates from college (OK 2 days, but still…) I’d like her to live as a single adult for a few years, but it’s not my choice, is it? She’s an adult, he’s an adult, they want to marry. I truly hope it’s a happily-ever-after for them, but I don’t think waiting 2 or 5 or even 10 years would guarantee that. They either make it work or not. It’s their right. Just as not getting married is your right. Like **Jess ** said, what’s it to you??

24

What are you afraid of?

25

This is ridiculous. Don’t put words in my mouth. If you’ve got the perspective that marriage is an economic decision, then fine. Marry whenever you want. But if you want a marriage for emotional reasons, because the man or woman is your “soul mate” or “the one”, is preposterous to think you can identify this soul mate after knowing him or her for less than a year. That’s what I’m saying.

Meanwhile, nice way to make assumptions. I am NOT living with my b/f, I’m living alone and so is he.

26

No, I have plenty of time to decide to have kids. 25 is young! Don’t you tell people in their mid-twenties that they better hurry up and decide about the kids issue. What’s wrong with you?

27

Yeah, I’d make that argument. You can’t make a decision like who is “the one” for you after such a short amount of time. Although I’d argue that people who are older and making the decision are factoring in more practical reasons why they want to be married. With younger ones, in my experience, it’s not about practicalities and more “we’re in love and he’s the one and it’s meant to be!”

28

Because as the movie said, when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

29

Yeah, but that’s really where my rant begins: romantic impatience is no reason to get married. The reason I’m making a rant out of it is because this seems to me to be becoming an institutionalized mistake.

Meanwhile, nice username.

30

Not true. While I agree the OP needs to MHOB, I’ve repeated heard that people who marry young have a higher incidence of divorce than those who marry in their mid-twenties.

This is confirmed in threemae’s link, which shows the percentage of dissolved marriages after 5, 10, 15, 20, and 30 years.

Age at Marriage

13-17 37 50 57 63 68
18,19 30 43 50 55 61
20,21 22 32 39 44 51
22,23 15 23 29 33 40
24-26 14 28 34 41 44
27-29 16 28 31 36 39
30+ 13 20 23 27 31

Statistically, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between getting married at 22 and 30+, except at the 20-30+ year mark.

FTR, I married at 27-- hubby at 28–days before our respective 28th and 29th birthdays (we’re 368 days apart, heh).

31

There’s nothing *wrong * with her, any more than there’s anything *wrong * with you. Just because some people want to live in a state of perpetual adolescence doesn’t mean that their bodies will oblige them. Fertility can be a narrow window, and it’s worth thinking about.

Seriously, I’m not a proponent of early marriage, but I also don’t especially care what people who aren’t me do with their lives. Why do you?

32

Because I went through age related infertility and had my kids late because I had the same “I have plenty of time” attitude. Because I’ve watched my sister, my cousin, and several friends go through it. And because we all agree if we had to do it again, we’d at least make the decision on whether or not we wanted kids in our early-mid twenties and not pretend like time and our bodies were going to wait for us to get our acts together.

I wouldn’t get married at 19 and have kids, but I sure as hell think its stupid to pretend like you’ve got all the time in the world to decide whether you even want kids when you are already 25.

33

Agh, it’s really more how long you know someone than what age they are, but I see more of a correlation of young people (people I know, FTR) that are more likely to just want to “get married”, so a successful 6-month relationship will lead to thoughts of marriage.

34

What she said. I was 23 and he was 34 when we got married. He proposed a year after we’d met, when we’d been a couple for nine months. We’d both already decided that the other was The One before then. We got married a year and four months after the engagement. Would have done it sooner, but I wanted to graduate first. We’d already been living together for a year.

Sure you can. We did. OK, we didn’t get married in that time frame, but we already knew we were going to. We’ve been happily married 17 years and counting, and we’re still totally committed to each other first, having been through some crap times and come out fine on the other side.

But yeah, it was a stupid, preposterous decision because we didn’t wait for some arbitrary time period. :rolleyes: Screw that.

Oh, and he was my first serious relationship and the only person I’ve had any sort of sexual contact with (other than kissing). I suppose I should have dumped him and slept around some more, just to get a few more notches on my bedpost, huh? :rolleyes: Fuck that too.

35

Don’t you extrapolate your infertility problems on me or anyone else in their 20s who is childless. I’ve already had an abortion. I do not want children. If that changes later, great. I’ll worry about it then. But to talk, “biological clock” at 20-somethings is absurd. I’m barely two years out of college, for the love of god.

36

Okay seriously… why are you such a miserable bitch on the subject?

37

No, it’s not, because by the time you’re in your 30s, most women will already have declining fertility. This isn’t something that goes until it stops, it’s more like a hill, and you’re getting fairly close to the top.

You don’t have to have kids, that’s your choice. But it makes sense for young women to know that hey, you don’t have as much time as you might think.

38

Of course it’s a reason to get married. It’s the only reason to get married. I’m the least romantic person in the world–married in the courthouse, didn’t tell anyone until afterward, no party or acknowlegement, we went out of our way to find stainless steel wedding bands because the solid, utilitarian nature of our relationship is the most important thing to us. And the timing of our marriage was pretty much about economics–I needed insurance. But that’s not why we married. We married because we were each other’s favorite people ever–we were family–and formalizing it made sense.

My mom and dad got married 7 months after they met. She had 4 kids under 6, and they promptly moved across the country together. They’ve been married 35 years now, and are as happy as can be.

Look, some of those people getting married at 22 after a year just want to be married. And some are really with the right person and making the right choice. Sometimes it’s painful to watch the former, and if you have a chain of them in your immediate circle, I understand your frustration. I’ve had bad patterns repeat themselves in my social circle. But I think you are overgeneralizing.

39

She’s not saying you have to have children now, she’s saying you have to start deciding if you eventually want them soon. It’s not just a matter of getting pregnant–it’s that you have about 10 years to have them, and there will be many choices in the next few years that will have reprecussions of at least ten years–where you live, the sort of career choices and commitments you make, the sort of relationships you persue. It’s quite possible to make a series of choices now that would make it extremely difficult to ever have children, and while there is nothing wrong with making those choices, you need to know and understand what you are chosing. Twenty-five to thirty go very quickly.

40

NightRabbit, I can certainly understand that taking time to know someone–to see more than just the positive side that they will try to present to you during the early stages of a relationship–is crucial towards a successful marriage. This is just common sense, really. Certainly, there are examples to the contrary (as FairyChatMom volunteered), but on the whole, understanding the nuances and complexities of an entire person takes an incredibly long time.

That said, I would add that what “an incredibly long time” means varies astronomically from couple to couple. I’ve known couples that were together for decades, while never truly understanding who their partner/spouse was and even what they themselves wanted. In fact, I would venture so far as to say that truly understanding a person in the “I know that we are destined to be soulmates forever” variety is flat out impossible. If you are searching for this all-consuming feeling with your boyfriend, you are never going to find it.

Many others have said so far that people’s interests, desires and personalities are always changing. (Surely you’ve heard of many people going through mid-life crises?) YOU WILL NEVER KNOW whether you are capable of spending your entire life with someone, even if your entire life only has six months left. Spending time getting to know somebody increases the odds. But it will never be an exact science, there will always be margins of error. And I think the idea of assuming that things will just “fall into place”, that one way you’ll realize “This is the one, nothing can break us apart now” just leads to complacency and a slide in maintenance of the relationship, which will undoubtedly lead to problems and makes the failure of the relationship much more likely.

Marriage means something different for everyone. You cannot simply assume that all people get married because they’ve “found the right person”. Many, many people out there are not this vague and imprecise; we think about things, we formulate our own definitions and opinions and add our own nuances of meaning. Surely being on the Dope helps you witness that!

Of course, there are those who don’t think things through. A friend of mine, for example, who is twenty and a college sophomore, got engaged after six months of dating the first guy who treated her decently–not surprisingly, they broke up a few weeks later. I knew it was a mistake, not because of her age or education or even how long she was dating; it’s because she didn’t know what she wanted, and she hadn’t given herself enough opportunity to really understand this guy’s character.

People are never going to be perfect in their search for whatever the hell they’re looking for. But we are going to try, and many of us are going to succeed, and there will be some who completely defy the odds (for example, my hippie-era parents, who were married at eighteen and twenty-one and are still together to this day). And honestly, the couples getting married early probably understand their situation and the nuances of their relationship better than you do. (If they don’t, that’s one huge red flag in their marriage, no matter what the perameters for their relationship are!)