What do you accept as reasons to get married at all?
I guess I can pipe in here…
I got married at age 21. My wife was 19 at the time. As it was, we knew each other for about three years when we got married. We did not live together before marriage (religious reasons).
When I first met Lisa, I was 18 and she was 16. Within three weeks, we knew that we were going to get married, it was just a matter of when… 18 and 16 are a bit young. Lisa was the second girl I ever went out on a date with. I was the first guy she dated. I suppose we can be considered the “poster couple” for the OP’s case.
That being said…
There are times that you just know the person you have now is the right one for you. I felt that when I first met Lisa and, as I said, within three weeks, I was sure of it… at the “ripe old age” of 18.
Is it possible that I could have met someone else who could have made me happy? I suppose in the theoretical it’s possible (although I can’t imagine having a better spouse than Lisa), but why should I turn away the pearl I have, for the offhand chance that I might find one in the future? Believe it or not, we were mature enough at 18 and 16 to know what we wanted in a spouse. Perhaps it’s because due to our religion we already had similar outlooks on life, similar values and similar ideals. And I can tell you that in the sixteen plus years that we have been married, I have never regretted for a day the “missed opportunities” to play the field or see other people.
Even if living together were an option for us (it wasn’t due to religious beliefs), we still probably would have gotten married when we did. After three years of dating, I think we knew each other about as well as we possibly could without physically living together. So, why not get married? Why have the intermediate step of living together when we both knew for three years that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together?
Zev Steinhardt
You have to admit, pkbites was lucky it worked out so well. For everyone who “just knew” their brand new SO was The One and is married for 50 years there’s someone who got divorced a year later, going :smack: , why did I rush into that? A little Cher/Greg Allman moment, if you know what I mean.
Though dating for a long time is no guarantee, it certainly would mean you knew more about the person. I don’t see how anyone can debate that knowing more about someone to whom you’re making a lifetime commitment can’t be a bad thing. I don’t think you need to date for 5 years, either. In fact, I’d call that a waste of time, but there is a happy medium in there.
We married when we did (husband was 19, I was 23) because it was the only way he could qualify for undergraduate student loans. Otherwise his parents’ income would be part of the equation. His relationship with them was really poor right then and he wanted to be emancipated for a whole bunch of reasons.
I also wanted to get married because I didn’t think it was wise of me to move out of state and support us while “my boyfriend” earned his degree. For me to undertake that risk and responsibility, I felt we should be married.
We ended up changing the date of our wedding from late July to mid-March, which convinced everyone that I was pregnant. 
Actually it was because we discovered the financial aid forms were due on April 1.
We had children 4 years ago, after 16 years of marriage.
I think your OP was kind of stupid because you can’t assume you know how other people live. You just don’t know.
I think it’s often the case that dysfunction leads us to the relationships we choose. That old saying about how “we marry our parents” can be quite true. But, if we’re willing and able to face our problems (and have the resources to do so) it can be a wonderful opportunity for growth.
Oh yeah, and I absolutely knew he was “the one” right from the start. Just one of those things. We’ve had tons of problems, but he’s still “the one”.
Desperate my ass. I was a strapping 19 year old. It was towards the end of the disco era (remember, the drinking age was 18) AIDS was still unkown, the sexual revolution was still strong, and I was in my first semester of college. A guy on the prowl could screw himself blind if he wanted to. It was a beautiful thing!
I’m not going to go into the full story of our meet, But when you run into “her” you can be 19 or you can be 35. There is nothing wrong with a whirlwind romance, and there is nothing wrong with 19 year olds getting married, and theres nothing wrong with having a short engagement. Lots of people settle down young. Lots of people successfully do lots of things without any imput from the likes of you!
Because you love someone and want to spend the rest of your life with someone is a great reason! But, jesus, be sane about it. If you don’t know someone THAT well but are still convinced that they’re the one for you, allow yourself the time of a longer engagement to actually GET TO KNOW the person. Beyond the idea that you can’t really love someone you don’t know. You don’t “know” someone intimately after only a month, or a handful of months. Just because you don’t marry someone immediately doesn’t mean you don’t love them, or you don’t feel strongly.
What’s funny is the sense, of some, that if a marriage doesn’t work out, then it’s only a divorce, what’s the big deal? Yeah, I want to pledge “forever” in front of my entire family, in front of everyone I love, just to take it back a couple years down the line. Since when has someone’s word come to mean so little that they’ll promise “forever” and think, in the back of their minds, “It doesn’t matter, I can just take this back if it doesn’t work out.” Sorry, I don’t think that way. I don’t respect people who make quick promises thinking that it won’t be a big deal if they need to rescind it later on.
That being said, if you’re open about doing it for a reason like student loans, then fine! I have nothing against economic or political marriages if you admit it. But to say, “we’re in love, I know he’s ‘the one’” when it’s really all about economics is disingenuous.
That’s “Dr. Retarded,” thank you. I knew within a month that I would be marrying my partner. We did so 9 months after starting to date. Our tenth anniversary is this spring. Both of us are extremely trustworthy and not rash, but neither are we risk-aversive.
I disagree.
Some people are complicated. I’m not. My husband isn’t.
And some people really want to be complicated, and to make things as complex and confusing and hard as possible.
I just don’t think getting to know someone is that hard in a lot of cases. I do think it takes some time. I’m not a believer in love at first sight. But it doesn’t take all that long to get a really good idea, if you choose to pay attention.
Of course, lots of people ignore warning signs and then claim they didn’t know the other person.
As for thinking divorce isn’t that big a deal, sorry. I refuse to act like the world will end if someone (including me) gets divorced. It’s a shame whenever plans go awry, but no. I don’t consider it a moral failing. I don’t consider divorce “failure” at all.
In two days, we’ll have our 10 year anniversary. We’re doing something right, no matter how retarded and rash you think us.
Who, outside of drunken celebrities, gets married thinking that they’re going to get divorced? What planet are you living on? Seriously, your vitriol on this subject is a little unbelievable and :dubious: -making.
If I hadn’t known I could get divorced, I wouldn’t have gotten married. But that’s not the same thing as going in expecting to divorce.
I had a conversation with my boss at the time. We were talking about the decision to have kids. He said that the decision to have kids was a lot harder than the decision to get married because in marriage you can always get a divorce but with kids you are kind of stuck for the next 20 or so years if things go bad. This was one of the more sober responsible people I have ever known. So I think people other than flighty Hollywood types take into account that you can get out of things if they really go south. For the record they are still married and the kids and marriage seem to be going strong.
I thought I would go back to the OP’s statement.
There are three separate issues here -
- marriage at a young age
- marriage after not knowing the person for very long
- cohabitation before marriage
Prior posters linked to studies that indicated there there is some relationship between marriage before 25 and divorce. There is also a relationship between marrying LATE and divorce (there is apparently a sweet spot):
There is research that shows a relationship between cohabitation and divorce as well:
http://www.vifamily.ca/library/cft/divorce_05.html#What_causes
Which then brings us to the question of, “how long should you know someone before getting married?”
We can ask Ted Huston:
http://www.utexas.edu/features/archive/2003/love.html
So what does that all mean?
Age matters, in the sense that you know who you are and can communicate that to your future spouse. If you are mature enough to openly discuss with your spouse exactly what you want in life, where you want to go, and how you both fit together - then go for it.
-Algher (married at 23, past the 15 year mark with two kids, moves, job losses, graduate school for both of us, unemployment checks, and the rest. I wouldn’t trade her for anything.)
Frankly, this is a silly response to NightRabbit’s valid point, that you don’t know someone until time passes and you see them in a wide range of situations. You’re not complicated is your answer to that? How do you know how the person handles adversity? How they handle temptation? How about how they handle the boring, everyday bullshit of a long-term relationship? Everything looks rosy in the first few months. When the newness wears off and that hard shit starts, THAT is the test of a relationship’s mettle. You (not you, jsgoddess, the general “you” who gets married quickly) made it through that without knowing shit about your SO? Awesome for you. Not something I’d recommend as policy, though.
All these happy anecdotal stories are just that-- anecdotes. An OP with this title was bound to draw heavy fire from people whose early marriages were a smashing success who are feeling attacked by the OP. All the people whose early marriages were a disaster, they’re not as likely to come screaming in here to admit that. That does nothing to invalidate the fact that the OP HAS A VALID FUCKING POINT. Sure, your situation was different. Great. That doesn’t mean getting married after knowing someone for one month is a really good idea, in general. Nor is it a great idea to get married at a very young age. The statistics are pretty clear on that. It could work out, but the odds are against you-- and they’re against you for some solid reasons.
Sure - but the hard shit happens at different times. First job hunt, first layoff, first firing, first promotion, first need to fire someone else, first addition of 4 inches to the waistband, first business trip with temptation, first fight, 100th fight, etc.
Sooner or later you have to decide if you have amasses enough data to determine whether or not your potential spouse’s personality is one that you want to spend the rest of your life with. Personalities themselves are very stable - people really don’t change that much. The biggest mistake is assuming that someone will change once married - that is not going ot happen. The same shit you deal with now will still be there after marriage, it will just react to new stimuli (a bad day at work vs. a bad day in class perhaps).
I agree with you pretty much completely. You’d also have to agree, though, that there’s not a whole lot of logic behind thinking that you have amassed a realistically sufficient amount of data after one month, say. I don’t think there’s any way you could see all the relevant facets of a personality in that time. You might have a feeling about the person, which I did when I met my husband, the very day you meet them. A rational person waits for some confirmation, because god knows I’ve been wrong as hell about people I’d have bet cash money on in the first month. I think this is true for most folks, if not in relationships, in friendships.
One of my best friends got married at 19, pregnant, and lived to regret it.
Once divorced, she drummed into her daughter how important it was to know the person you marry very well, to wait until you’re in a safe relationship to have children. In other words, she didn’t want her daughter to make the mistakes she made.
Her daughter didn’t. After dating a number of guys, D (the daughter) met a man with whom she fell in love almost right away. They dated for over a year, then they moved in together. After living together for 2 years, they got engaged at Christmas and planned for a summer wedding.
Then they both worked hard in order to save for a down payment on a house, they wanted to get that done before having a child. Finally, when their goal was in view, they got married the same month they moved into their new house.
Two years later-- we’re talking a long, long relationship here— she got pregnant. It was planned. They were ecstatic. Their daughter was born, christened. By the time she was 6 months old, the husband had started an affair with a woman at work, and left D, saying that all that father and family stuff wasn’t for him. He had thought it was, but he had made a mistake.
My point? There are no hard and set rules in life. We don’t have several lives like in some video games in which you can start over as though mistakes hadn’t occurred. You can plan for your future, it’s a wise thing to do, but you can’t plan for everything including other people’s lives.
If you expect that you can control all the variables, you’re in for a hard kick in the teeth from life, NightRabbit.
Maybe because I didn’t wear rosy fucking glasses to start with? Maybe because I’m not some retarded romantic who expects everything to work out exactly according to a plan, so I’m not hysterically disappointed if someone doesn’t live up to my ideals 24/7? Maybe my wants and needs aren’t measured down to the micron and I have a lot of tolerance for, you know, the other fucking person in my relationship to have his own mixture of good and bad so that minor details don’t become deal breakers?
No. It simply has to be that I don’t understand my own marriage and need some dipshits on a messageboard to explain it all to me.
Wow. Defensive much? No one can have a point but you, eh? No one is telling you anything about YOUR marriage. Were they? Or are you just flipping shit?
Getting to know someone for a bit of time before getting married is a good idea. No amount of shrill off-point shouting from you is going to convince me otherwise. Your marriage is working for you? Excellent. I don’t think you can make generalizations from that anymore than Night Rabbit can.
Defensive? Probably not. Tired as fucking hell of you? Yes.
Gosh, I guess that proves your point: It took time for me to get to know, and dislike, the real you.
Ah, so your ire is not about the topic, but your dislike of me… Now it all makes sense. You have an ignore list. Use it, don’t tire yourself out unnecessarily, princess.
If you think you know the “real” me from bullshit on a message board, then you have your head farther up your ass than I even originally thought. Really, do try to stay on topic. Even someone as uncomplicated as yourself can see that you’re hijacking the OP.