Intaglio was 24 when we married. I’m four and a bit years older. She looked like she was sixteen.
While we were still only engaged, some unbelively forward woman approached us in a laundy where we were washing our uniforms (She doing hers, and me doing mine). Blythly ignoring the female uniform components lying about (size small dungarees, skirts, that sorta thing), she congratulated me on bagging such a young girl and training her right. She assumed I had Intaglio doing my laundry. :eek: :mad:
Intaglio got her back up quite a bit, and proceded to icily correct this… person. It bounced right off. This unmitigated boor of a woman proceded to ramble on about how girls should mary young, and how failing to do so was a disasterous mistake, and then talked about how she lived, and with whom she lived, and generally made us feel like Jerry Springer had to be doing a “Candid Camera” bit, with us as the suckers.
As soon as our laundry was done, we were gone. Intaglio still clenches her teeth when this subject comes up.
OTOH, I met a fifteen year-old wife in the USO once. She was waiting for her flight to go meet her E-1 husband. A teenaged wife in base housing…? :eek: I fear she had a rough go of it. Base housing can be a harsh social environment.
I still get that whole “you married too young!” bit. I married in 1989, when I was 20, after living with my husband for nearly 2 years. Even now I get the bullshit. Don’t look for it to stop any time soon.
My husband moved in with my family when I was 16. So we lived together for 2 years before we got married. Yep, got married when I was 18, ten days after I graduated High School, to be exact. Everybody, even the people who should have known better assumed I was pregnant. When I convinced them I wasn’t pregnant, they all insisted that getting married would ruin my life, and brought up college. “I thought you were going to college!” They’d whine. Most of them my teachers.
I was really hurt by this. I was one of their best students. THey knew I applied to ten different schools because they helped me! They knew how hard I worked! Yet because they made mistakes, and their husbands were domineering assholes who wanted them to quit school and start a family, they all assumed everybody who gets married after HS will have the same experiences.
Getting married the best thing I’ve ever done.
As a historian, I’m thinking about how much this conversation would have amused people a couple of hundred years ago.
With the exception of the girl that married at fifteen, all of you would have been considered old maids. You might have had trouble finding husbands at such advanced age, because if no man had wanted to marry you before now, something must be wrong with you!
Our culture of late marriage would have been considered strange in the least . . . a bizarre over-extention of childhood.
If I had gotten married when I was that young, I would have been on my fourth wife by now. I was horribly immature in so many ways.
This is one of the fallacies in trying to apply general statistics to individual cases. It’s always the case, YMMV.
Besides, I suspect some of those stats are cooked. Half of all marriages fail? Maybe, but consider my sil and her ex’s. They must have at least six failed hitches among them. Which may mean there’s five couples out there that’ll stay happily married.
I was pregnant when I got married at a young age ( 17).
Its been almost 8 years since then. Its worked out ok.
I didn’t get married just because I was pregnant. I got the engagement ring for my 17th birthday, I found out I was pregnant almost 4 months later, after we had picked a date. Screw all those who thought/think we got married just because I was pregnant.
My mom was 18 when she married my Dad (who was 25). Everyone assumed she was pregnant. I mean, even my great-grandmother asked her if she “could wear white.” My father wanted to send birth announcements when they got a kitten I wasn’t born until less than a month before their second aniversary(they’ve been married 27 years now, btw, so it doesn’t always end up in disaster if you marry young.), so in addition to people having thought she was pregnant when she got married, she forever after had people asking her why she got married so young if she wasn’t pregnant. Stupid people.
Since we are in the pit… I would like to give a great big FUCK YOU! to everyone who looks down uponthose of us who marry earlier than your underdeveloped minds! I got engaged at 19, my wife got pregnant a month or so later, so we bumped up our wedding date a few months, and I still get those “she got pregnant?” disdain questions. Yes! and I have trully never been happier, nor could any college experience bring me more joy than my daughter does everyday.
My husband and I were both 21 when we got married. We were both in college here in New York, working hard on our degrees and accepted to law school, but planned to get married during the break between our junior and senior years, back in my hometown in Missisippi. When we got back there we too had to face the presumption that we had to marry. There were more than a few “sly” questions to my granny and my aunts from the community busybodies who were trying to ascertain if I’d disclosed pregnancy to my family. In fact, we were both virgins until our wedding night. That was the summer of 1981.
The next time we were back in Mississippi was for Christmas in 1982, and I lost count of how many people came up to us everywhere we went, even at church and expressed almost sarcastic surprise that we were both still in school and that we hadn’t had a baby yet. And every year thereafter, when we’d go home for the holidays or family events there would be surprise (though I am glad to say that it eventually became less sarcastic) that we hadn’t had a child.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! for all the wonderful support. I almos went and decked a girl at work yesterday (who is about to graduate from HS) who looked at me with first shock and then disdain when she found out I was only 24 and married. She also told me getting married before even attempting to go to college was one of the worst mistakes a woman could make. I flat out told her I am NOT the college type, nor do I consider myself intelligent enough to pick a major. I am 24 years old and I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, so I consider college not something that I absolutely HAVE to do. Why do people think I have ruined my life?If I am happy with what I have right now and we are happily married,what the fuck business is it of yours? Really?
Well, there is nothing wrong with not going to college if it is your choice not to go. Marriage is no bar to attending college, I think it helped me. I was married for over a year before starting college. I graduated 5 years later magna cum laude with 2 degrees, one in math, and one in computer science.
My mother began dating my father when she was 14 and he… well, wasn’t. To top matters, he was a teacher at her junior high school. This was in the Alabama hills in 1950, and what people thought strangest about their relationship was that he had a college degree and didn’t hunt.
They married the week she turned sixteen (he was not quite twice that) and were married until his death thirty years later. While she missed out on proms and “girl stuff”, she also ended up going to college, which she had never even considered before marrying him (he basically informed rather than convinced her that she was going) and when she briefly moved back to her home town in her early 20s she found she could no longer relate to the people around her because SHE had matured beyond them even though they were twice her age (e.g. they still believed Catholics were evil [they’d never actually met one, but if one came around they’d know] and blacks weren’t quite human).
OTOH, she told my sisters that if they even considered marrying before they were 25 she’d lock them in the basement. Both married at 21- for one it worked, for the other it didn’t. My brother married at 19, everbody knew it was going to be a failure because of his hot headedness and her naivety, and they just celebrated their silver anniversary.
One of many hillbilly family scandals: when my grandfather married in 1918, his wife was a 16 year old whose maid of honor was her “old maid” 21 year old sister. My grandfather’s father was his best man and during the rehearsals “took a shine” to his future daughter-in-law’s sister (his wife had been dead for a few years), so the next month they married as well (i.e. he and his son married sisters). There were four children from my grandparents marriage and thirteen from the marriage of my great-grandfather and my great-aunt (the youngest being born when she was in her late 40s and he was in his early 80s).
Point: don’t bring your sister to a 1918 Alabama hilbilly wedding.
If you’re happy with your life, be happy. Let your happiness be a beacon in the darkness that is the life of people that have to go around telling everyone else how to live their lives.
A friend of mine once said about marriage (when asked if she found it limiting to have married young); “Limiting? Not at all. It actually makes it possible for me to do more, not less.”
I wasn’t born until less than a month before their second aniversary(they’ve been married 27 years now, btw, so it doesn’t always end up in disaster if you marry young.), so in addition to people having thought she was pregnant when she got married, she forever after had people asking her why she got married so young if she wasn’t pregnant. Stupid people.