Yeah, getting married at 16-20 was pretty much the norm before. Women expecting to have careers instead of their parents just trying to get them married off. Just a whole mind-shift from 50 years ago.
Not really, among my age group it was true. In the Midwest many of my friends were getting married in college. In NYC, very few of my friends under 30 were married. In fact, I met more married people under 30 living apart (because it used to be tough to get a divorce in New York) than living together.
You're right though, that maybe it should say "so few commit for the rest of their lives at an early age." Most of my friends had absolutely no desire to get married before 30 in NYC.
> But after that year, they decided to get back together and get married almost immediately without seeing what it would be like to live with one another.
Keep in mind that at the time your parents would have tied the knot, pre-marital cohabitation was statistically a predictor of increased likelihood of divorce. [1]
Hmm in my community it’s very odd to get married before your late twenties. Children and house come several years later (if at all). Looking at the parent and grandparent comments I think there are two main reasons for this:
(1) If you grow up around educated people, college is the obvious way to kick off a financially stable life. That means school until 22+ followed by working for as much money as possible to dig out of student debt. By the time you can breathe a bit, you’re 30.
(2) Marriage is moving from a foundation to a capstone. In my social circle, virtually nobody got married in their early 20s. They didn’t feel they could before figuring out their careers, choosing a city, having some independent adventures. Sure there was romance, but not the long term commitment and financial integration.
I think The common thread between these two issues is “hunger.” If you’re like GP and grew up in a poor area, you’re willing to take risks to get out. It makes sense to marry the best partner you can find locally and climb out together. You’re not “discovering myself before settling down” you’re pair-climbing a mountain, recognizing it’s safer with help. Hopefully when you reach the summit the shared experience will keep you together against the pressure of expansive options available there.
One key question: does marrying reduce or increase your geographic flexibility? For college-first people, you have to move around while single to build your career, then marry wherever you wind up. If you marry first, it’s harder to find a place that optimizes earning potential for both partners.
I think a lot about what this means for my own children. I want them to take more risks, but I don’t want them to fall short of what I have achieved. I want them to support themselves as early as possible, but I know education is generally a more profitable use of time. (Should they be working minimum wage jobs or studying or school nights?) There are many reasons why the youth unemployment rate is so high.
Many of the people I knew who married at 22 made bad marital choices. At least in the eyes of their family and friends. I say that because they tended to marry before they had established careers and before they had really lived independently after school. Even if you think that modern society forces people to postpone adulthood for too long, it does not necessarily follow that early marriages will benefit people on average. After all, if adulthood is delayed, then immature people will tend to make bad choices regarding future mates.
I married in my late 20s. I have not avoided long term relationships.
Millennials I know that are now in their 30s have already been “married” in name 1 or 2 times. We just don’t make it official like previous generations did because of cultural pressures.
That's a decent point, yes.
For a second I wanted to argue that many people I know that did marry early have the same gripes, but it's also possible that people that married early long ago married because it was much more expected back then, meaning they may have even married non ideal women too just to get the process of life going. That would explain why many 50 year old men are just as jaded. They married what today would be a bad woman, but they did it early in 1985 when everyone was getting married at 24.
That may be a factor, but getting married later is also just correlated with a higher level of education. It's very rare for someone that goes to college to get married before graduation. But in poorer areas it is not uncommon to see people marry shortly after high school.
I've wondered the same thing. There's no doubt a lot of people who aren't a good fit for each other or hadn't yet attained the requisite level of maturity, resources, etc to make things work who felt forced to marry in some capacity, and the fuses of individuals in such relationships will almost certainly be short. It's a setup for failure.
I believe it's particularly bad for couples who got married under 26 or so, because due to the brain finishing up development and accumulating some real world experience, people tend to settle into who they'll be for the rest of their life at around that age and the change can be stark. It's not hard to imagine a couple who were wed at 20 and very much into each other drifting apart in their late 20s after that shift takes place.
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