I know a few rather young couples who are getting married (one pair are 20, another are 21, one pair are 19 but have set a date next year) and my knee-jerk reaction to this (which I didn’t share with them of course) was, how do you know you’re making the right choice? They’ve all been dating for at least a year or two, but they haven’t lived together, experienced post-college life together, etc. So I was wondering if I could get a general opinion on when it makes sense to start looking at something as really long-term, and when it makes sense to get engaged.
My opinion was that you should be out of (undergraduate) college and have at least lived together for six months to a year. Or if you aren’t someone who did a traditional, four-year undergraduate program, you should at least be past college age. Does this make sense? Or does the more traditional ‘wait to move in until you’re married’ make sense, and in that case, how long should you have been dating before you can know?
Have any Dopers had experience with marring young, or only dating someone for only a little while before getting married? Did it work out?
Not a written-in-stone law, but by then you’re still young, but have been at your career for a while, have lived as a grown up on your own for years, have had a few relationships, have had some time to figure out what you want out of other people and your relationships. I got married young; would not recommend it. Mileage varies, etc.
My parents married at 20 and 21, although my father had left high school early and was already in law school. (My mother dropped out of college, where she was unhappy, shortly afterwards, and only went back when her youngest was in school.) They are the happiest married couple I know, and are going on 33 years together.
How do you define ‘a little while’? Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish community, nearly every couple I know dated for well under a year before marrying, and living together is unheard-of. Mr. GilaB and I dated for seven months, were engaged for three, and didn’t live together before marrying. The divorce rate in my community is well below the American average, and my sense is that couples are at least as happy as that mythical Average American Couple. I don’t think an extremely long courtship period increases the odds of success of the relationship long-term; in some ways, you know the person better, but I think couples who date for a shorter period don’t necessarily have the expectation that they know everything about their partner, and that their partner will never change.
That said, I think that overall, marriage requires a certain maturity level frequently lacking in those in their late teens and early twenties.
I guess I’ll also add that my parents started dating when they were undergraduates and married 5 years later. By that time they had lived together for a few years - in one place with friends and then in a couple more places where it was just the two of them. They’re still married 35 years later but I’m not sure how much things have changed since the late '60s.
I’ve always said that there is no roadmap for the human heart. I actually like the idea of people growing together, but then again, I think you have to be a certain level of developed first and mature. In our world, the way people are run is that they don’t exist until x goal is met and so they don’t come into their own until much later. Which all provides fodder for easy breakups. The bigger issue I see is that more and more, people are having better communication options to reach out with; and that gives people the incentive to not stick it out. Why would you? You can just go meet somebody new and not have to deal with that. That puts marriages at greater risk. Of course, the problem with that is that sometimes it’s better for you if you tough it out.
That all being said, I’m a fool for love, so I support expressions of it.
I see no blanket advantages to getting married younger than the mid-to-late 20s, and many possible disadvantages based on inexperience, immaturity, the huge life changes that a lot of people go through between 17 and 25 or so, and the fact that most young people these days aren’t self-sufficient or financially independent until their mid-20s or later.
My parents got married at just-turned-21 and 23 after knowing each other 6 months, and they had a fairly happy marriage for close to 20 years and three children. However IMO my mom would have been much happier in every way if she had had a fulfilling career (and probably no children) instead of spending 15 years being a stay-at-home mom dragged around the country as my dad searched for his dream job. Resentment about her role in their marriage and how it contributed to her life being totally unfulfilling is a big part of what ended their relationship. If she had had the chance to live her own life for a few years rather than going straight from her mom’s controlling grip to my dad’s fantasy of Christian wife and mother, I think she would have made very different choices and ended up with a completely different sort of life.
It’s a big gray area, what makes a ‘good marriage’. Loving each other isn’t everything.
None of my same-age friends (I’m nearly 26) are dating the same person they were in their late teens/early 20s. Those who did marry very young are already divorced (2) or seem to be heading that way (2). That’s just my circle of acquaintances though - and we are not religious, or in the military.
Like a lot of things, it depends. My husband and I started dating just before I turned 19, married just before I turned 22, and here a couple of days after my 26th birthday we’re still going strong. When you do get married that young, though, you have to be aware that you’re both going to change, and you’ll either grow together or grow apart. I think we were probably also a bit more mature than the average bear - my younger brother is now almost exactly the age I was when I got married, and he says he can’t imagine getting married himself right now. Most of my friends got married later than we did, and the few I know who were married younger than us are divorced now (with one exception, still doing great, but also a very “mature for their age” couple).
I say who cares? If you want to get married young, get married young. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. What else are they going to do? Spend the next decade barhopping like they are still in college until they are in their mid 30s and all bitter and single because the only people left to date are developmentally arrested commitmentphobes and bitter divorcees?
There’s no “right” or “wrong” choice. It’s not like anything is written in stone. This isn’t the 1950s where a woman needs to marry some middle class jerk so she can have a roof over her head while he drags himself to the office every day.
I’m with the crowd that says late 20s, early 30s.
I’ve just known too many people who got married in their early 20s who later have some sort of midlife crisis where they resent having missed out on the freedom of being a single adult and end up divorced. Divorcerate.org has an interesting chart showing divorce rates for various marriage ages. Pretty high for the 20-24 year old crowd.
People seem to be acting as if the end goal is a mariage that lasts forever. There is no guarantee that will happen whether you get married at 20 or at 50.
Also, it’s not that easy to find someone you actually want to live with for years and years. If you have a good thing at 20, you might be able to find that again in 5-10 years. Plenty of people end up dying alone being eaten by their 30 cats.
I think his point is that if you are 21 and you meet someone you think is amazing, that you mesh with, that treats you well, that fits perfectly into your life, it would be stupid to walk away from them just because you have this intellectual idea that a marriage that starts early is more likely to not work out.
And sure, you can say “well, date that person, but don’t marry them”, but that’s kinda irrelevant: once a relationship starts, it generally intensifies at it’s own pace, and it’s really difficult to intentionally keep it light–especially if you really, really mesh with the person. You can put off formalizing things with a piece of paper, but that’s the smallest part of becoming a unit with someone. Advising someone not to marry until X age really means advising against getting into any relationship that is serious or likely to become serious (because once it starts intensifying, the heart pretty much sets it’s own pace) and that seems like a good way to miss out on a potentially great partner.
I agree that you should be more rational about when you bring kids into it: absent some really compelling reason (like a disease that limits fertility), it’s generally a good idea to wait until a relationship has reached a happy equilibrium, gone through a major change like a move or a career shift or a major family trauma, and then reached equilibrium again before introducing the largest change of all. But simple marriage? It’s a reasonable risk. In the worst case, you go through a lot of pain. But that happens no matter what.
Not all marriages that end in divorce were mistakes. Sometimes people can do a lot of good for each other, teach each other a lot of things, create between them a lot of joy and satisfaction, and even if things go pear-shaped later, those early positives are not somehow nullified. If anything, sometimes the marriage was a great idea and postponing divorce, out of a misguided idea that it would make the marriage a “failure” is the only mistake. Kids obviously complicate things, but you really can’t evaluate whether or not a marriage was a good idea by whether or not it lasts a lifetime.
I think in the US most people aren’t really ready to make a “lifetime” commitment in their early 20s. When I see people getting married that young, I wince. But that doesn’t make it wrong.
I got married when I was 23 and she was 22. It lasted about ten-and-a-half years. It was a mistake in that we both got married for the wrong reasons and decided to ignore some important warning signs. I do think that more life experience on both of our parts would have potentially helped us to make better choices and possibly have avoided making the mistake of getting married. However, I don’t think there’s a magic age where people suddenly develop this sort of wisdom.
For us, low self-esteem was a factor on both sides, and I have encountered people much further along in life who have made the same mistake. So I can’t automatically say that getting married young is a bad idea. But I do think that the less life experience you have, the more difficult it is to fully assess all the factors that make for a successful and happy relationship.
Oh, and for God’s sake, please live together before you get married.
I do think that, in my case, getting married was a mistake. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I regret it. There were a lot of great times that came out of my marriage, and I developed in a lot of positive ways, much of which I have my ex to thank for.
My parents met and married in college. At the time my father was 20 and my mother 18. I think they knew each other six months before both the engagement and the marriage. They lived together before they got married.
My wife and I dated for two years and got engaged largely because I was going to go to grad school out of state and needed to “shit or get off the pot”, which is probably the wrong reason to get married. I was 27 and she was 29 at the time. We had never lived together prior to the engagement though we were already having sex. So, we started our lives together as an engaged couple in another state and lived together for the first time during a very stressful time in our lives when money was tight. We got married while I was still in grad school during the summer. We’ve been married almost 14 years now and have had very few problems or fights to date, though I won’t lie, that first year was tough. If it had been up to me, I would have wanted to date just a little longer to come to the same conclusion I came to anyway rather than feeling forced to do it. I did like the idea we lived together for a year while engaged to make sure everything would work out first, but in the end, we’re still happily married, so I guess it didn’t matter.
The long and the short of it is once the bride is at least 25 years old at the time of marriage, the chance of divorce plummets. This is though to be for a variety of reasons included on the linked page, from income to shared chores to relationship with her father to cohabitating only as a path to marriage to home ownership and premarital counseling. Very interesting tidbit I didn’t know: cheating is a dealbreaker at all income levels. I would have thought at either end of the spectrum people looked the other way more often.
My version: I’ll be getting married at 27 and the groom will be 25. We will be younger than our parents were; his married both at 30 and mine married at 30 and 40, first marriages for all. His divorced 3 years later (due to infidelity) and mine are still together. Even my grandmother was older than I’ll be at marriage time. This is highly unusual within our family and yet many others feel we should already be married because we’ve been together for 2.5 years and many more feel we should marry before he goes off to law school (which would mean we’d be 22 and 24 and marry in the next 2 months). YMMV, as with many things.