Exactamundo.
There is always a tendency to think the grass is greener somewhere else. But if you always think like that you might not appreciate what you actually have.
Lots of wisdom here.
Some people say I married young. I was 23. Compared to other family members, who married at 16, 17, 18 years old, I was practically an old maid. Before I met Sr. Olives, my plan was to get through graduate school on my own and then find a nice man to settle down with. I didn’t know I was going to meet the perfect guy during freshman orientation when I was barely 18. Words are never enough to describe how I feel about my husband. He’s an extraordinary human being and even though we’re not religious I admit he often makes me a feel a touch of the divine. We would have been crazy to walk away from that.
We were talking marriage from the beginning, but we didn’t actually tie the knot until four years into our relationship. He had just received his B.S. and I was a year away from graduation myself. We both planned on grad school so we weren’t laboring under any delusions that our future was going to be footloose and fancy-free. We knew there would be sacrifices, moving around, long commutes, and strain on our relationship. But by that point we’d already walked through fire together and knew we could handle it.
That was five years ago this Saturday. I just finished grad school and he’s still plugging away at his Ph.D. Being in a relationship and grad school at the same time is really freaking stressful, but as predicted, we’re handling it. I guess we did marry young, but it’s not like we rushed into it or anything. I don’t know what to say, really; generally I think people in their early 20s should think long and hard about marriage. We were immature in certain ways, but mature enough in the right ways to make long-term commitments. We’ve grown a lot since then, but we’re not radically different - just better versions of our old selves. I don’t regret marrying him for a second, and I think the timing was perfect.
Keeping it light is not the same thing as not getting married yet. Many unmarried people are in serious, committed and at times even cohabitating relationships. I wouldn’t tell anyone “Don’t get into a serious relationship until you’re 25,” as that’s a bad idea for a shitload of reasons, plus heck, I’ve done it several times. I had a boyfriend for nearly three years, and we lived together for one of them. But I would say that the goal of a marriage is for it to be permanent, though the dissolution of marriage is not the end of the world. Also, I’m not making factual statements about the appropriate age to get married. Hell, my mother got married at 24, and she’s been with my dad since 1968. I speak in generalities here when I say 21 year olds suck at marriage. Of course, like most things in life, this is a case-by-case thing, and people are free to do whatever they want.
That sounds like a bunch of people who are getting married to have sex. In my opinion, this is one of the worst reasons to get married.
It does? Really? Based on what?
I couldn’t live with someone for three years without intending to live with them forever: I just don’t do open ended. I can’t stand to leave decisions just hanging there, not for years and years. And once you’ve made the leap to “this is permanent”, what does it matter if you get the paperwork right then or wait 5 years? It’ll be the same emotional nightmare if it falls apart.
But this may just be a fundamental way that people are different. I’ve known people who dated for years and weren’t sure where it was headed. But that would never have worked for me: the only way for me to avoid marrying young would be to avoid dating anyone I really liked.
I will echo the late 20’s and early 30’s. People around 20 still have a ton of growing up to do. Most people at that age, don’t even know who they really are, what their long term goals are, what they truly believe in. The more mature you are when you make a mate decision the greater likelihood of it being successful over the long term.
That makes sense in theory, but in practice what do you do? I mean, if your daughter were 21 and dating a great guy: a really extraordinary young man–kind, funny, excellent grades, hard worker, polite, seems to really get her, fits into your family like a glove and they are just head over heels for each other, what do you advise? At some point in the following few years (certainly less than 10), they are going to either decide to make a go at making a life together, or they are going to break up. You can’t just date and “see how it turns out” for a decade. I don’t think you can do it for five years. People (or at least, a lot of people) are wired to move towards more certainty than that.
I mean, do you tell your daughter to dump that guy right away, because she’s too young to marry any time soon, and where else is this going to go? Because I think that would be crazy.
Me, I just advise her not to have a baby for a good long time. That can be put off. But I don’t think making a permanent commitment–ceremony or not–can be. Human nature prevents it.
I met Anita when I was 18. It wasn’t the first sexual or romantic relationship for either of us. We never “fell in love”, but hit it off immediately in a “really good friends” sort of way, and our relationship was exclusive from Day One. Not that we planned or intended it that way- that’s just the way it went.
Five or six months along, we decided to get married, but put it off until she got her degree. (She’s a couple of years older than me.) Our only “future planning” involved children- early on, we had established (to our immense relief) that neither of us was interested in having kids.
We got married ten months after that first date, five months shy of my 20th birthday.
Exactly four days and three hours from now, we’ll celebrate Wedding Anniversary #41. We’re still best friends to each other, have never regretted not having children.
Full Disclosure: about ten years in, we had several very rocky, VERY painful years, but eventually we both came to our senses, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
Edit: (reading other posts now) We didn’t live together until our wedding day.
I don’t mean to sound smug or braggy about this; we consider ourselves to be VERY fortunate.
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Yes.
There isn’t any single answer. When you’re ready, and when you are stable are good guides.
My parents got married at about 20 (this was the late 1930s) and stayed happily married until my mother died almost 50 years later. We got married when I was 26, and though we had known each other for 7 years we never lived closer than 600 miles apart, and didn’t even talk to each other for long periods. We’ve been married 33 years. My daughter got married at 26 also, but had lived with her husband for about 4 years, through thick and through thin. She was the one resisting, and she waited until they were finally settled in grad schools. All 3 totally different, and all 3 worked.
This is it.
You never know for sure you are making the right choice - unless you get married on your deathbed there is always the chance the marriage will fall apart.
However, the more self actualized you and your spouse are, and the more you understand each other and how you work together (and the one word answer to that is “well”), the better your chances are to have a long marriage.
Those two things TEND to come with age and time spent together in U.S. culture. That doesn’t mean there aren’t 19 year olds who know themselves well and aren’t ready to get married, but they are fairly rare.
And that is mainstream U.S. culture. Where its ok to get divorced, where we expect fireworks in our relationships. The rules are going to change significantly if you have other factors.
I think people should strongly be discouraged from getting in to committed long-term relationships (dating, cohabitation or marriage) of any sort before their mid-twenties, when they’ve been out of school at least a couple of years.
Having some time being young and single is good for you. It gives you space to travel, take risks, go the extra mile career-wise, meet a variety of people, explore your sexuality and the variety available to you, gain confidence, nourish friendships, mature emotionally and generally just explore yourself and learn to stand on your own.
Relationships change a lot of things. They have the potential to be enormously emotionally fulfilling. But it also creates very real limits. Your circle of friends gets smaller. Your ability to move around- for pleasure as well as for work/school/whatever- becomes sharply limited. You have less time for trying new activities that may expand your horizons- you probably won’t be going to so many meet up groups, community events, etc. and those that you attend will often be about your partner’s interests rather than your own. Your ability to explore your sexuality slows down as it becomes focused on one person. Your emotional maturity slows as you start to grow into another person rather than growing into yourself.
Of course, relationships have tons of positives, too. But there is plenty of time for relationships, and very little time to be single. I don’t see any reason to rush things.
I’m not denying that early marriages can work out beautifully and vastly improve the people in them. But that’s no reason to encourage early marriage. Some people undergo vast self-improvement and find fulfillment spending time in prison, but that’s not a recommended path.
I’m more concerned about people who invest their young years in committed relationships that realistically were not going anywhere (as I did) but I think it’s good advice in general.
Meh. It didn’t seem open-ended to us at the time. We planned on staying together; it just didn’t work out, and when it didn’t, I sure was glad that we were just living together, and not actually married. Those formalized pieces of paper you casually refer to as marriage become a cumbersome pain in one’s backside when it’s time to part. But that’s not my point. I’m not here to discuss paperwork.
At some point during a serious relationship, two people will likely ask themselves if this is it, if they want to turn their coupling into a lifelong commitment and get married. Should the answer to this question necessarily be yes because they love each other and have been together for a few years? When you’re very young, why can’t the answer be “I don’t know” or “Not yet” or “Let’s give ourselves more time” or even, horror or horrors, “No”? I don’t understand why people who aren’t even old enough to have been in serious relationships need to marry the first person they’ve been with for a while. Chill out, kids. Life’s short, but not that short.
Being together for a few years is certainly not a reason to decide to settle down with someone: loving someone may not even be a reason. But at some point, I think most people turn around and discover that they’ve gone beyond that. They can’t say “I don’t know” because they do know–they aren’t faking or pretending or playing house, they really do genuinely know that they want to make a life together, they want to commit, they want this to be the template for the future. And I think reaching that point is basically outside of a person’s control. Once someone’s there, they can’t tell themselves to “chill out” about it, they can’t stuff that genie back in the bottle.
And sometimes those people are making mistakes. Sometimes the marriage is a bad idea. But once you know, however erroneously, that someone is the person you are going to spend your life with, you can’t ignore that knowledge: you’ve got to play it out. The only way to avoid that situation would be to take conscious steps to avoid any emotional entanglement that was likely to strengthen, and that seems crazy.
Now, I don’t think someone needs to marry young. I think lots of people go through their 20s and never meet anyone they really click with. And sometimes those people convince themselves that they are in love when they should have said “no” or “I don’t know” or “maybe”. There are certainly plenty of people who do need to just “chill out” and not think of marriage as the be-all, end-all, or as the litmus test of whether a relationship is legitimate. Certainly society pressures people to invent “true love” when it isn’t there out of some idea that you aren’t really grown up or something until you are married.
But I think a significant number of people really do meet good matches when they are young, and it seems silly for them to walk away from those matches out of some sort of idea that all young matches are flawed–as silly as staying with someone out of the ideal that True Love is always the goal.
It has nothing to do with “growing up” IMHO. Is has more to do with marrying late enough so that when you inevetably get so bored 10, 20 years down the road that you can’t stand the sight of the other person. By then, you are too old to find someone else so you just suck it up and wait for death.
I have and will advise all of my children that I believe they should wait. That at age 20, they should not rush into making such decisions as marriage. Naturally, it’s ultimately their decision and I will love them and support the decision they make, but I will not hold back my advice.
That’s ludicrous. Most people feel differently about themselves when they are 29 than when they were 19. They have a better understanding of “who they are” and what they want out of life.
I agree. A 19 year old is not a fully formed person yet and hasn’t been in the “real” world long, or at all. Their wants, needs, and values are most likely going to change.