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In Defense Of Marrying Young—Updated

Posted by Rebecca Teti in Marriage on Tuesday, September 02, 2008 9:30 PM

Bristol Palin’s unwed pregnancy is not so unusual these days, but her solution—marriage—is. Mounting their hobby horse, the usual suspects have seized on her situation as evidence that abstinence education doesn’t work. Rather a leap of logic, that, since no matter what values her parents tried to instill, we don’t know what education she received at school.

Be that as it may, I want to ride that same pony—the fact that teens are very tempted by sex (“they’re going to do it anyway”)—to a different conclusion. Maybe we should encourage our kids to marry young?

Let’s stipulate that when we marry isn’t exactly under our control, taking two as it does, and being subject to the mysterious workings of Providence.( I might have liked to marry at 17, but there was a serious lack of suitors at the time.) It’s no one’s particular situation I’m calling into question, just our cultural assumptions.

The standard advice we give young people is to finish their education, get a good job and find themselves before taking the plunge of getting married. It sounds right, but here’s the catch. Psychologists tell us that character solidifies at about age 30. After that it becomes not impossible but vastly more difficult for the couple truly to knit themselves into unity. Youth, by contrast is more flexible and a young couple has the benefit of being able to build from scratch, if you will, instead of trying to remodel. My observation has been that the younger a couple marries, the more success they will have forging a coherent family life rather than persevering forever in what is more or less a roommate model of marriage: two separate lives lived in the same household with some necessary overlap.

I have some friends who married as high school sweethearts at 19. Their early years were lean, but now they’re in their mid-40s, still quite young by today’s standards, and they truly grew up together, learned to lean on each other through thick and thin, raised nine children to adulthood and find themselves with a vast future ahead of them while they are still young enough to enjoy it. Best of all, they aren’t facing the most challenging (because most exhausting) years of marriage and family life at precisely the moment their personal energy levels plummet. They’re celebrating their silver anniversary at a time when many of their peers are just getting started with babies. That seems like a better model to me.

I would have kept this to myself as a nutty notion, but I found back-up!  Frederica Mathewes-Green writes:

The average first marriage now involves a 25-year-old bride and a 27-year-old groom. As an old natural-childbirth instructor, I’m intrigued by how patently unnatural that is. God designed our bodies to desire to mate much earlier, and through most of history, cultures have accommodated that desire by enabling people to wed by their late teens or early twenties.

Which brings us back to that kernel of truth in the “they’re going to do it anyway” argument. Yes, maybe they are—but the solution is to permit and encourage marriage earlier. It is better to marry than to burn!

I can hear the objection: but 17 or 19 is too young to make a commitment.

Young people are not too immature to marry, unless we tell them they are. Fifty years ago, when the average bride was 20, the divorce rate was half what it is now, because the culture encouraged and sustained those marriages. But if we communicate to young people that we think they’re inherently incapable of making a marriage work, they will surely meet that expectation.

Mathewes-Green then goes what I’m inclined to think one better:

I have a theory that late marriage contributes to an *increased* divorce rate. During those lingering years of unmarried adulthood, young people may not be getting married, but they’re still falling in love. They fall in love, and break up, and undergo terrible pain, but find that with time they get over it. This is true even if they remain chaste. By the time these young people marry they may have had many opportunities to learn how to walk away from a promise. They’ve been training for divorce.

We could interject here that something similar holds true for priestly and religious vocations. We want kids to “finish their educations” first, but the deterioration of our educational system means that we have to go to school longer and longer to accomplish what a high school degree used to do. What if years of putting off God’s call silences our kids’ ability to hear him? Our pastor always makes the point he heard God calling him to the priesthood when he was 13, and while his isn’t the only version of a vocation story, it’s amazingly common.

But getting back to the question of marriage:

Late marriage means fighting God’s design for our bodies, and that’s never a fight we can win. My hobbyhorse in the project of restoring a viable idea of adulthood is to encourage finding ways to support and enable young marriage. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece detailing some recommendations for this, which gave the intentionally shocking title, “Let’s have more teen pregnancy.”

Married teen pregnancy of course.

I have additional reinforcement here, in Danielle Crittenden’s article, The Cost of Delaying Marriage, which is well worth reading in full, but I’ll just cite this:

We strengthen a muscle by using it, and that is true of the heart and mind, too. By waiting and waiting and waiting to commit to someone, our capacity for love shrinks and withers. This doesn’t mean that women or men should marry the first reasonable person to come along, or someone with whom they are not in love. But we should, at a much earlier age than we do now, take a serious attitude toward dating and begin preparing ourselves to settle down. For it’s in the act of taking up the roles we’ve been taught to avoid or postpone – wife, husband, mother, father – that we build our identities, expand our lives, and achieve the fullness of character we desire.

So that makes three of us in favor of marrying young. And I’m going to guess Arwen’s on my side. What do you think? Remember: hypothetically. Late marriage isn’t wrong, and no one’s life is under the microscope.

Update: Thanks so much, everyone, for all the thoughtful feedback, both pro and con, to my deliberately provocative post. I’ve been enjoying checking in on this conversation off and on throughout the day. As I sense the remarks are starting to take a turn for the personal, however, I want to jump in to try to re-direct the conversation a wee bit.

1. A reminder—as I was careful to state twice in my original remarks—of course the most important question for any particular person is to follow of the will of God for his or her life. There are too many individuating factors in anyone’s life for any rule—whether it be “Try to marry by 22” or “Don’t even think about marrying before 22” to be useful. We can see from the comments thus far that we’re all agreed on that point at least, so please, don’t anyone take this personally. We are analyzing broad cultural assumptions here, not telling anyone she did it wrong!

2.  I think it might be helpful to summarize the objections. I thank my friend Mary Hasson for putting the practical objection as strongly as it can be put (see comment #14 for the whole thing).

While your personal experience suggests that young marriages are beautiful, the statistical reality paints a far uglier picture—young (especially teen) marriages have a much higher divorce rate, with resulting casualties to themselves and whatever children they may have. Most of us who have raised children through the teen years and into their twenties see the huge growth in maturity that occurs between the ages of 17 and 22. The vast majority of college freshman can’t decide on a major, let alone a spouse.  We (as a culture) don’t think they are wise, prudent, and self-restrained enough to use alcohol wisely until they are 21…but you suggest we should encourage them to make a decision with lifelong ramifications for others, not just themselves?

Sheo at # 17 has an important rejoinder to that:

No, we shouldn’t just send our immature teens out into the world to make families on their own in an anti-family culture.  But let’s not kid ourselves - they ARE making families, but aborting or abandoning them.

Still, who can deny the validity of Mary’s objections? I’m sure any of us—even those who married young!—looking at the culture around us would have to be very worried if our kids came to us wanting to marry very young (17, as I suggested with deliberate provocation). With great respect, however (I disagree with Mary Hasson with fear and trembling!), I think those practical concerns beg the question Frederica Mathewes-Green raises in her article, namely: does it have to be that way?  Isn’t it possible the reason college kids can’t choose a major is because that’s the highest question posed to them—we assume they’re fit for nothing more?

The other objection I really appreciate is this one from Aileen, which is brilliant (#28):

I personally disagree with the attitude towards parenthood as well (which gives rise to part of the argument that earlier is better) in this post.  That it is a chore and duty.  One which, the sooner you are done, the sooner you can “enjoy” life (”[Rebecca’s friends] find themselves with a vast future ahead of them while they are still young enough to enjoy it. Best of all, they aren’t facing the most challenging (because most exhausting) years of marriage and family life at precisely the moment their personal energy levels plummet”).  I certainly understand the point here, but at least for me it never occurred to me that when I am “done” with my kids I’ll be too old to enjoy life!  What am I doing now?  Enjoying life!  With my kids!

Excellent, Aileen! That’s to hoist me by my own petard. I withdraw that remark and limit myself to observing that it still seems better to me—in the abstract—to raise lots of little ones while you still have a lot of natural energy. (See point #1, above).

3. Just to preserve what’s left of my political viability should I ever be asked to run for vice-president   : my point in posting is not seriously to recommend everyone marry at 17, no questions asked.  It’s to question whether our visceral reaction against young marriage is founded on the culture of life and the theology of the body or on our subtle absorption of some anti-marriage and anti-child attitudes. Surely creating a Christian culture and a culture of life means more than accepting the culture’s way of doing things in every respect—but with abstinence on the top? So let me put the question another way (and I hope this will make it more clear that neither I nor Mathewes-Green nor Danielle Crittenden think anyone’s marriage is “unnatural”). Does the shack-up culture and rampant unwed pregnancy have something to teach us? Not by way of imitation, but by way of what comes naturally to young people? Is it reasonable to expect people with the vocation to marriage to abstain for 10,15,20 years before fulfilling that vocation (all other things being equal)? Might not getting in the habit of deliberately avoiding that vocation actually damage our ability to fulfill it in the end? Are our kids “training for divorce” as Mathewes-Greene puts it? We worry a great deal about the dangers of marrying early, but shouldn’t we teach our kids to weigh also the dangers to the soul of postponing commitment for too long? Should we perhaps be looking for ways to make marriage more “do-able”? “I-do-able,” if you will.

OK—back at it, now. These remarks written after comment #31.

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