I just don’t see “marriage” as the life-changing decision here: it’s the falling in love and making a personal commitment, and that can’t be stopped or put off: that will happen on it’s own if you stay with someone you are highly compatible. If she’s with a great guy at 20 and lets nature take it’s course, there’s a high probability she will be in a stable, committed relationship she views as permanent by the time she is 24, whether or not she marries.
So if you don’t want her in a stable, committed relationship she views as permanent at 24, you have to advise her to dump the perfect guy at 20 because he’s perfect. Would you do that?
On the other hand you may never get bored. Plus, living by yourself for too long makes one set in his ways, and that makes the compromises required for marriage more difficult.
The problem is I don’t think you can judge if someone is perfect at 20. Besides guys and girls are a dime a dozen.
A lot of people leaving college get married, because they think they’ll never have an opportunity to find anyone else later in life, which is a bunch of hooey.
ETA: Breaking up with someone that you are dating is no comparison to divorcing someone you are married to and possibly have kids with.
I don’t think perfect matches are a dime a dozen: I don’t really believe in “soul mates”, but I think most people would be lucky to meet six people over the course of their lives that they were truly compatible with, and at a time when both were available.
I’ve said over and over again that I think delaying kids is a great idea, practically a moral imperative. But if you have two people breaking up at 28, after 8 years together, is it really going to make a difference whether or not they had a wedding ceremony? By then all their stuff is mingled, all their friends are mutual, they are a part of each other’s families, they’ve lost the sense of who they are when they are single. They are relying on each to take care of tasks, to remember information, to be responsible for different spheres. Their 20s are gone, and any advantage to being you, and not part of we, in your twenties is gone.
You could try to avoid that: you could date the man at 20 but never move in together, never meet his family or let him meet yours, never take over a set of tasks or let him take over anything, never share finances or make joint purchases, never spend major holidays together, but who the hell could live like that from 20 until 28? What kind of bizarre, twilight relationship would that be? Human nature absolutely compels people who are in love and compatible to move into a partnership.
If you want to avoid the very high risk of relationship collapse in your late twenties, if you want to keep your twenties about you as an individual, not you as a partner, it’s not enough to avoid marrying at 20, you have to avoid falling in love. And I am not sure how you do that without carefully, and with malice aforethought, avoiding anyone that is a good potential match. And I think that would be stupid.
This isn’t to say everyone will meet a good match at 20 or in their 20s at all: most won’t. But the ones that do have to play it out. They can’t delay escalating the relationship for ten years.
I think of “falling in love” as being something we allow ourselves to do. So to me there’s nothing unrealistic about saying, “I’m going to keep this light because I am not ready for a serious relationship right now.”
Manda JO, another part of the problem, is that at 20, many people think they have met the perfect match, when in reality, they haven’t even figured out who they really are, so how can they know really if that person is the perfect match.
I know several people that have been married since their early 20’s, successfully and happy. But I know a lot more, that got married and then ended up divorcing by the time they were in their late 20’s and early 30’s, normally with 1 or 2 kids.
As I said before, I have and will continue to advise my children, male and female, to wait until they are older before considering marriage. I will also advise my children, to not live with someone else until they are married, and to not have children until they are married. It’s ultimately their lives, and I will respect and support their decisions, but I will not hold back my advice, simply because they tell their mom or me, that they’ve found the perfect match.
That’s not what I asked. I asked if you’d advise them to avoid a relationship that might grow into something serious, especially one that you perceived as an unusually good match. Because I don’t think most people can keep that sort of relationship “non-marital” for eight or ten years. Could you have casually dated your wife for the better part of a decade before becoming emotionally, socially, and financially entangled?
As I said, I’m not going to advise them to avoid a relationship, just not get married. I also doubt that I would perceive any couple under the age of 25 as “a good match” warranting marriage.
You seem to be hung up on this isolated chance that they may meet their “match” at an early age. Again, as I said, I don’t think most 20 year olds can meet their match at that age, because they don’t know who they are, so how could they know what their match is.
I disagree with all this “perfect match” and “not being fully developed” stuff. It’s not like once you hit 30 you stop growing as a person. If people never got married because one or both parties would be different in ten years, no one would get married.
Or you would get so freakin bored anyway since the person you married hasn’t changed in decades!
There’s an ebb and flow to most relationships. If one person isn’t ready to commit, the other one isn’t necessarily in that same place. So the chances of that relationship still being extant AND light seems pretty slim. After all, the whole purpose of waiting is to see where you go as a person, with the assumption that it’s not likely you will want to marry the same person at 30 as you did at 20. It’s not really expecting someone to wait around for 8 or 10 years. It’s expecting they won’t want to and you won’t want them to.