Married young: Did you get comments on it?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Solfy’s comment in this thread Baaaaad relationship moves... that worked! - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board started me thinking.

I, too, married young, and occasionally got crap for being engaged so young, even when I just casually referred to “my fiancé” as you would to “my friend” or “my sister” when telling a story. After a while, I just started saying “my boyfriend,” depending on the audience. I remember hearing all kinds of versions of “Aren’t you a little too young to be engaged?*” I later thought of responding with “Aren’t you a little too old to be so rude?” but sadly it was too late. Solfy, I respect and covet your wit.

Were these people raised by wolves? That’s rude.

I’m willing to make allowances in situations where a very close friend or family member is attempting to prevent something they see as a dire mistake. Even then, it’s touchy, and that certainly doesn’t apply during chit chat with a classmate or coworker.

My poor husband was sad that I often just referred to him as my “boyfriend” instead of “fiancé” in work or school related situations, to avoid the hassle, but after I reported the comments a few times, he understood.

Is it weird that I was annoyed by this? Did others who married young get this crap? Did being a woman have anything to do with it, or did you men who married young get this too? My husband says he didn’t, but then, he’s not really that observant of social nuances. You have to hit him with a brick before he notices. Why do people do this? My working theory is that some people are just nosy and we should shoot *Nerf * at them until they act better, but I would love to hear other experiences and opinions.
*I also got asked if I was going to work after graduation and others in the direction that since I was getting married after graduation, that must have been my entire motivation for going to college. (In 2005, I got these comments. Most were lame jokes, but I was still irritated.) It was either that or screeching girls happily asking me about tulle and diamonds and flowers and colors and dates and babies. (We had 10 people at our wedding, including the two of us and the officiant. I bought a white skirt, and we got a bouquet of flowers from the grocery store on the way to the courtyard at the town hall. Not big on girly stuff, here.) Nothing wrong with liking all of that stuff, but just because someone mentions, “We’re moving to X, where I’ll work at Y, and then we’re getting married,” during a group discussion of post graduation plans, doesn’t mean they want to take over the conversation with talk of pink fluffy clouds.

2

My wife and I got married when I was 22 and she was 21. Yes, we got our share of comments about being awfully young. But people who were close to us knew better and didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. Eight and a half years later, we’re not showing any signs of slowing down. We never had any doubts.

[Squirrel Nut Zippers]

Long ago I had a dream that quickly faded
Goes to show how tricky things can be
But wouldn’t you agree that
Those who know whisper when they see us walking
“There’s a love that’s always meant to be.”

[/SNZ]

3

Fortunately, “always double-check your math” wasn’t in the vows. :smack:

I was 23, and she was 22.

4

I married a 23-year old when I was 20.

We got those comments. Turns out they were right…

5

I do think most people who do this do mean well and think they’re “warning” you. Statistically, people who get married before the age of 25 do have a higher risk of divorce than people who get married later on do.

6

I don’t get too many comments (I married at age 20), people comment more on the fact that there is a semi-large age gap between me and my husband. But mostly everyone minds their own business.

7

We were 23 when we got married, and we got both the “too young” comments and the “took you long enough!” comments. We went to a Christian university, where it was common to get married the weekend of graduation, if not before. My husband and I had started dating at the end of my freshman year, when I was 19; after Christmas break my sophomore year, when I was all of 20, people were coming up to me and grabbing my left hand, expecting that I would have gotten engaged at Christmas. When we got married, more than a year after graduation, people from college mostly said, “Finally!” But people from work were shocked that we would get married so young – they wanted us to go sow our wild oats, “live life!” and all.

We kinda figured that if both extremes thought we were doing it wrong, we probably had something right. :slight_smile: That, and it was really none of their business.

Our sixth wedding anniversary is Saturday, and it still feels like we have something right. :slight_smile:

8

My husband and I married as teenagers.** Everyone on the planet ** felt entitled to make a comment about how we were too young to be getting married.

We’ve been married almost 30 years now. Like Chuck Berry said, it goes to show you never can tell. I can’t say that I recommend others getting married that young, though. We still had a lot of growing up to do.

9

Mr. Moron and I got married 13 years ago, when we were 23 and 21, respectively. I don’t remember many, if any, comments about us being too young, just that we were rushing into it. (It was a very brief courtship.)
I had lots of friends and former school-mates who were getting engaged/married around the same time, so we weren’t unusual in that regard.
We did hear comments from several people who were surprised that we were a married couple, though, and not brother-and-sister like they’d thought.

10

I got a few, “You’re too young!” comments. I was 24 and Mr. Lissar was 22, almost 23. I thought it was a little ridiculous for anyone to say that 24 is too young to be married. Especially since we’d been dating for three years. It wasn’t a sudden, fast thing.

We’ll have been married five years this December.

11

My sister married when she was 20 and I think he was 22. They became engaged after three days and married in three weeks. They’ve been married 29 years, four living children, as well as a set of twin who died and two miscarriages. He spent a career in the military and they spent a good part of their marriage overseas. Her health hasn’t been great recently, but their partnership is still very strong. I talked to my B-I-L the other day and he said he knew he wanted to marry her on their first date.

StG

12

I got married at 24 (just a few days after my birthday, actually), and I used to get the comments all the time. We moved to NYC right after we got married, and no one gets married that young around here. It’s kind of frustrating, because everyone assumes that I’m either super naive or that I “settled.” What a bunch of crap. We’d been together for 5 years when we got married…we knew what we were doing.

13

I got married when I was 18 and he was 21, ten days after I graduated from high school. We had been together since I was 16, and “unofficially” engaged for almost as long as we were dating. Everybody thought it was a bad idea. My teachers begged me not to do it. My family didn’t make any comments–not many, anyway. What could my mom say? She was married at 19, and my grandmother was married at 16. Everybody said we would fail. The comment I got the most was, “Please don’t get married. I thought you wanted to go to school?!” I responded with, “Oh, that’s not a problem. Jaime said he’d unlock the chains, and I’d be allowed to leave the house for school.”

Well, we’ve been married for 6.5 years now. I finished my BA. I’m 5 months shy of finishing my MA. I’ll graduate a month before our 7th anniversary. I said I always wanted to be a writer–I’ve got several books published, and my first with a major publisher, in mass-market paperback, will be released in December. I still love my husband very much, and he’s my best friend in the world. He is a constant source of support, and he has never, ever done anything to hinder me or hold me back. He moved with me from the Bay Area to LA for school, and when I wanted to come back to Utah, he got to packing. I’ve traveled to Italy, and I go on regular trips for work and school while he keeps the home fires burning.

So I guess we haven’t done too bad. I know I’m a hell of a lot more successful than some of the people who begged me not to do it–including pretty much everybody in my family.

14

I’ve not made the comment about “You’re too young to get married.”

I have asked the very closely related question, though: “Have you thought this through completely?”

Part of it was that I was in the Navy at the time, and as a general rule of thumb, maybe one in ten marriages that started with both persons under the age of 23 ended within a year. And I saw a number of them. It’s both one of the very attractive things to military service for a lot of people that it can allow a very junior person to get married and start a family, and something that’s a huge problem in a few years.

IMNSHO there’s usually a huge amount of personality growth in people between ages 18 and 25. And the person one might be at 18 is often only marginally related to the person one is at 25. When you have two people going through that growth spurt at the same time, in a marriage they can often grow apart. Add the stresses of frequent deployments (one year my ship was in port for all of six weeks, IIRC.) and it’s a huge killer on marriages.

OTOH, when my cousin got married at nineteen I didn’t rush out to ask that question. A lot of it depends on how close I might be to the couple getting married, and how the topic got brought up. If I’m asked for opinions, I won’t hold back. If it’s a friend I might push the question. If it were someone I had some responsibility for, I might try to talk things out with them, just to mention the hazards so that he, at least, was aware of the potential shoals. If it were an acquaintance, I’d simply offer congratulations.

I’m sure that many people are rude about bringing up the idea, but I don’t think it’s always an unreasonable concern. Not for “sowing wild oats,” just because of what I see as the practical considerations.

15

We were both just barely 22, but not very many people thought that we were incredibly young. A few people were a little taken aback, but not many. My parents were thrilled, since they thought he was the greatest guy I’d ever dated (and I suppose they were right).

16

We got married right after I graduated from college…I was 22, he was 23…and not a soul ever said a word. Now this WAS way back in '79…and many of my friends got married that summer, right after college. No one thought it was odd then. In fact, you were still pretty much expected to get married and start your family right away back then. None of this hanging about for years, hoping you’ll still be fertile by the time you get around to deciding to have kids! But my older sister didn’t marry until she was 30 (and most people had given up on her ever doing so, and she did have trouble getting pregnant) and my older brother didn’t marry until he was 40-something and his wife was 30-something. It seems that the last ten years have seen this big shift in opinions, and now more parents are telling these older couples they should pay for their own weddings since they are waiting so long.

The only time I ever heard people (back then, and now) say someone was marrying too young, is if they were under 21. As soon as college was done, it was just fine…new life, new spouse, new job…it all seemed to go together. And some marriages lasted, (like all my friends) and some didn’t (mine), but it had nothing to do with our age when we married.

17

I was 20, husband was 23 when we got married.

I’m 23, we’ve been married for just over two and a half years and I still get the “But you’re so young!” comments.

Nobody told me it was a bad idea before we got married, but that mostly would have been because I didn’t tell anybody about it. My own family only found out about three weeks beforehand and my mum and grandma both married around the age of 20-21 so nobody thought that much about it.

18

I was 21 (3 weeks before 22nd b-day) and she was 22. People, especially sisters, figured we were getting married because we couldn’t wait to procreate. They couldn’t grasp why people that young would want to get married. Currently, we have 15 years and no kids, they aren’t married. If you find the right person, I don’t see using age as a reason to put off marriage. As long as you’re out of HS and living away from home.

19

We were both 25 (in 2001). Hardly anyone commented. Among the comments we did get was a cousin who said “You’re married and you’ve only known each other three years?!?”. Considering he had a baby with a girl he’d only known a couple of weeks, I thought it safe to ignore him.

We didn’t quite make our fifth wedding anniversary.

20

I’m surprised to see how many people in there 20’s were told they were too young? When the hell are you supposed to get married?

For the record I was 25 and my wife was 23. We’ll be married 14 years this December. I don’t recall anyone telling either of us we were too young. We did have some friends say don’t get married. But they seemed to think marriage doomed a relationship.