Based on the other thread in IMHO (apologies, I don’t have the link) on if “women should get married in their 20s” is good advice. Basically, the argument is that women have fewer single men to chose from as they get older, and so should get married in their 20s . Thus, someone needs to tell women this lest they accidentally end up childless and alone because they never considered this. A set of men in the thread seem to think this is great advice that would help avert a lot of problems.
Would hearing this advice, given by someone you trust and respect, have made your life better?
In my case, it’s a solid no. Any marriage in my 20s would have been a disaster, as I wasn’t ready and had no desire to get married at that time. I was well aware of the risks, but luckily finding a good partner in my 30s wasn’t a problem for me. So basically, bad advice that I’d already heard a million times and wouldn’t have listened to anyway.
Sorry, dude posting early but I do have daughters…
In a rare instance of agreement, their mother and I have warned them not to conflate love / marriage / children. Those are three completely different bundles of baggage, with marriage being the most superfluous, and potentially the most emotionally and financially harmful long-term. We’ve taught them: Always be open to love; have kids while you’re young and able to keep up with them; and get married after the loveglow has faded and you really know who and what your spouse is (and who/what you are).
I did get married in my 20’s, and that marriage is still going strong.
What my parents always told me was “don’t get married until you’re ready”. Held up the example of Aunt Ronnie, who had a very good marriage but didn’t marry until her 50’s. Uncle Ray must have been a prize because she always said he was worth the wait.
Anyhow - I married in my 20’s and wound up not having kids anyway. Not a problem.
I didn’t get married in my twenties, or the decade or so since.
I’ve never really dated anyone, or had any relationships likely to lead to marriage.
And I’m not sure how to fix that.
Better advice-- for me-- would certainly be to try dating (or singles events) before I “got my life together” because starting to date hasn’t gotten any easier since then, and nor have I gotten my life together as much as I would wish to.
Also, there sure are a lot of kids out there who are a bit older whom nobody wants to adopt, though that would make more sense for people who are themselves a bit older. At least that’s how it seems to me. I don’t understand these things.
The advice I got about marriage was to not do it until a) my education was completed (I knew from a very early age that I would be going to college - both my parents had advanced degrees and it was important to them that I get at least a bachelor’s) and b) that I must be very, very sure the other person was someone I could honestly see spending the rest of my life with, no reservations. Divorce is non-existent in my family, so yeah, no pressure there …
So the very earliest I could have married would have been at 22, and it really wasn’t on my mind at all at that time. I wasn’t mature enough emotionally at that point to have made a good marriage partner then in any case, and additionally I had my hands full starting a career, setting up my own household, etc. I needed that time to myself.
I never wanted kids, so I did not actively search for a marriage partner at any point - if it happened, great, if not, fine too. When I met my now-husband and it became clear that he a) wanted a marriage, and b) wanted it with me, I made as sure as I could that he was going to be OK with the no-kids thing.
I was in my late 20s and he was in his early 30s when we got married. We could have waited but for practical reasons we chose to do it then. It’s worked out fine, but I definitely wouldn’t have been ready earlier.
Putting aside whether its a good idea to get married in your twenties or not, I doubt there are very many woman who haven’t considered “the numbers game” aspect of seeking a partner as they get older. So as advice, its pretty worthless even if its true.
I’m in my early 30’s and have a decent number of female friends of the same age who’ve switched into “looking to get hitched” mode in the last few years. Generally speaking, they don’t seem to have had problems finding spouses they seem happy with. The pool of available men is somewhat smaller, but since men at that age have generally settled down more as well, the proportion of flakes is smaller as well.
My parents married in their early 20’s and are still together. Even still, I suspect that if my mother had to do it all over again, she would have waited. So that kind of advice wouldn’t be expected from her. My dad is a bit different because he’s more traditional. But he never told me specifically to marry in my 20’s.
My older sister married at age 25 (which isn’t even all that young) and is fairly unhappy in her relationship today. If she wasn’t so financially dependent on her husband, they probably would have divorced years ago. My brother married his high school sweetheart and they had a painful divorce 7 years later.
These examples, plus my own failed attempts to find anyone worth marrying in my 20’s–combined with my educational and professional priorities during that age period–would have made me very unappreciative of advice about marrying in my 20’s.
I got married at 24 and divorced at 26. I stayed single until I was sixty-something (can’t remember just exactly when we married as we lived together for around 20 years first). But then I never wanted to have kids. I also never wanted to get married when I was in my 30s and 40s because I was having too much fun. Now that I’m old, marriage seems like a good idea as long as it’s to this man, who is perfect for me and the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.
I think the advice to women to marry early is silly; those who want to will and those who don’t won’t.
Age didn’t enter the equation at all for me. If I’d married just about any of the guys I dated before my husband, it would have been a train wreck of epic proportions. And I didn’t particularly want to have kids anyway. All the women I know who married the guy they happened to be dating when their biological clocks started ticking have ended up divorced single parents.
Would I have liked to be partnered earlier than I ended up being? Sure, but I’m not sorry that I didn’t end up with any of those guys (though I am still friends with some of them, and they are mostly good people).
My parents never told us there was a “correct” time to get married.
It would never have come up for me in any case, as I met Suburban Plankton when I was 21. I was 24 when we got married. Still married 22 yrs later.
I think my mom did start to worry about it about my sister when she was not dating anyone or married by the time she turned 30. I think that is because my mom is a romantic and wants everyone to have a wonderful romance, and not because she felt my sister “should” be married by a certain age.
Being young and hormonal certainly works for making babies, but it’s not necessarily the best recipe for a successful, long-term marriage. I got married at 24. I have a very happy marriage, but a lot of that boils down to sheer, dumb luck.
I think that people who get married young tend to grow up together…or they grow apart. You’re not the same person at 23 as you are when you’re 33 and certainly not who you are at 43, 53 and 63… At 23 you’re less cautious, more impressionable, more malleable. At 33, you’re more established, more confident, and better able to take care of yourself and that only increases as you age. While that might mean that older people have more trouble finding a mate, because the numbers work against them, it is also because they can afford to be more picky. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Seriously, who pays attention to this kind of so-called “advice”? Any 20-year-old woman worth her salt will know if/when marriage is right without someone else’s blessing on which decade is critical. It is so destructive for women to put these artificial boundaries in play such as “I will be married before I’m 29”. That’s just not something that you can “plan”.
I got married when I was 20. This was not exactly the plan (I was in no particular hurry to get married), but I met my now-husband when I was 18, right after I got done backpacking around Europe, alone, the summer after high school. We dated about a year, then lived together a year. He backpacked with me in Peru for 3 weeks, which turned out to be a challenging trip, and that helped me understand how compatible we were.
I think we would have dated a while longer before eloping if he wasn’t military. The military has financial incentives to get married, and since we’d been together for 2 years, we did. For us, it has worked out fabulously, even though we don’t have kids.
We’ve been married for 14 years this year, we’re much better off than most people our ages that we know. We’ve built up a really solid financial footing, and our relationship, although it has had a few difficult times, is just…fantastic. It feels like a true partnership, like we’ve built this life together.
This isn’t to say I would advise people to get married early, but I would say not to discount the possibility. If you find a person who works for you and with you and you’re passionate about, don’t throw that away because you think you’re too young.
Got that advice (or, if not exactly “get married in your 20’s,” increasing worry about my unmarried state as my twenties went on), from my dad, who got married when he was 30. It didn’t really have much effect.
Interestingly, my mom, who got married when she was 20, would always counter that advice and tell me I had time, not to rush
I think that more than people telling me to get married in my 20’s, what might have caused me to get married earlier than I did (29, so I guess I just squeaked in there) would have been my parents (or whoever) teaching me more about relationships and emotional maturity and things like that. Because I think part of me realized that I was certainly not grownup enough to get married in my early 20’s! (Conversely, the people I know who did get married in their early 20’s by and large were extremely emotionally mature and knew what they were looking for.)
No, I would’ve laughed at them. The idea that there’s a universal ‘right’ time to get married is plain silly. And the idea that women should be told to get married in their twenties is predicated on the assumptions that a) marriage and babies are basically what women are all about, and b) they’re too dumb to figure out for themselves that their twenties are the optimum time for that.
I’ve been with my husband since our mid-twenties, but we didn’t get married till our mid-thirties. Which was exactly the right time for both of us. The idea that someone else could have decided that better than we did is, again, plain silly.
I was told a lot to get married in my twenties. What woman hasn’t heard that advice from someone? In the other thread they were acting like it was news. I did hook up with my life partner early (21) but he turned out to be a great guy. It had nothing to do with a timeline, though.
