Posted on 12/02/2012 7:21:17 AM PST by SeekAndFind
A recent article on Yahoo extolled “The Benefits of Marrying Later in Life.” The writer, who waited until age 46 to marry, listed the benefits of delaying marriage:
– Learning to love herself and accept her self-worth
– Time to become her own person
– Benefit of knowing who she is
– Experiencing life as her own complete person
With all due respect to the author, her list looks like a recipe for perpetual singleness. A decade or more of doing what’s best for “me” and learning to love and complete “myself” is not the best way to prepare for the sacrifices and selflessness required to be one half of a couple. Be honest: Would you want to marry someone who has spent two entire decades of her life “learning to love herself”? She’s going to be a tough act to follow.
According to the Pew Research Center, the median age for marriage in the United States has risen to a record 28.7 for men and 26.5 for women, which means that half are older than the median when they marry. Marriage overall has declined as well; barely half of Americans are currently married, a record low, compared to 72% in 1960.
But those averages don’t tell the whole story. More and more in our society, success is defined as progressing along a pathway that includes high school, college, graduate or professional school, a career with a 6-figure salary, and, after a long succession of “practice” relationships, perhaps marriage and children (if the woman’s AARP-eligible eggs hold out that long).
Of course, it hasn’t always been that way. Until the early 1900s, no one had ever heard the words “teenager” and “adolescence.” Upon reaching the age of maturity (usually in the late teens), young people were expected to court and marry in short order. If a 20-something lived in his parents’ basement, he usually had a good excuse — such as missing hands and feet, or being in a permanent comatose state. In the book From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America, Beth Bailey describes the societal changes that led to our current dating and marriage culture and the new phase of life we now know as extended adolescence:
Because young people were released, to a great extent, from adult responsibilities and decisions, the act of choosing a lifelong mate did not seem so immediately important. Within youth culture, the emphasis in courtship shifted to the social and recreational process of dating…
In a span of about 50 years, we went from supervised courtship with the expectation that marriage would be the end result to casual, recreational dating and, eventually, cohabitation as an accepted precursor or replacement for marriage. As a result of these cultural changes, not only has the marriage age crept steadily upward, but so has the divorce rate. Currently around 50% of new marriages end in divorce, compared to 8% in 1900 and 25% in the early 70s, when no-fault divorce laws appeared.
In light of these statistics, I’d like to suggest four compelling reasons why marrying earlier in life (perhaps by the mid-20s) might be beneficial.
In his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris recounts a young woman’s dream about her wedding day. As she meets her groom at the altar, other young women begin to line up behind her future husband. They are both devastated as they realize that he will be bringing his (rather large) entourage of ex-girlfriends into their marriage. Harris goes on to explain that the dream was a metaphor for his dating experience.
He realized that he had given each girl a piece of his heart and had taken pieces of theirs. Each successive relationship left him with a little less to give to his future wife. It’s like when you stick two pieces of masking tape together and pull them apart. If you continue to repeat the process over and over again, eventually no stickiness remains. There would always be memories, thoughts, and images that were shared in previous relationships that would influence, and to some extent shape, the future marriage. Memories from past relationships can linger for dozens of years and threaten the foundations of even the most stable marriages. According to a survey at Your Tango, thinking about exes is a serious problem:
- 74% of women and 64% of men think about their ex too much
- 76% of women and 70% of men have looked up an ex on the internet
- 50% of women and 40% of men say they look at their ex’s Facebook or other online profile too often
In simple risk-assessment terms, the less baggage and the fewer corpses of past relationships you drag into your marriage, the stronger the foundation will be.
Regardless of your age at the time of your marriage, you can count on both partners changing over the course of the relationship. Those who marry younger grow together rather than independently. My husband and I are approaching the 25-mile marker in our marriage and we are not the same people we married those many years ago. I was working at a job I hated and my husband was going to school and working at an oil change shop while serving in the National Guard. We lived frugally in a 3-room rental in a sketchy neighborhood in W. Akron. A few years later we bought our first house in a neighborhood on the outskirts of inner-city Akron for $38,000. Gary spent his weekends keeping our cars running and I learned how to make 101 recipes using ground chuck, which was $0.89/lb back then. If we had waited until our 30s or 40s to marry, we’d have missed those precious years of working together toward our goals and watching the lovely, slow progress that emerges over the years of living life as a team and arriving at the destination together. I wouldn’t trade those years of joy and struggles for anything. King Solomon, a man of extraordinary wisdom, had this to say: ”
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 ESV)
I suppose there are benefits to waiting until you have everything figured out and you have achieved success in your career before you “settle down,” but what a grand adventure you are missing along the way with the love of your life!
Our sexual desires and ability to procreate are innate, God-given characteristics. Those are precious, beautiful things and, as a Christian, I believe the Bible teaches they are reserved for the confines of marriages (read Steven Crowder’s excellent account of the rewards of abstinence before marriage). This is the best plan for a healthy, happy marriage. Expecting men and women with this sexual ethic to suppress those feelings until they are 30 or even 40 is frustrating, difficult, and, probably for many, cruel and unusual punishment. Marrying earlier rather than later avoids the frustration of denying and repressing one’s natural sexual urges and allows them to be expressed appropriately in the context of marriage. In addition, the 20s are the peak fertility years, especially for women. Marrying earlier can help avoid the heartache of infertility that so many couples face when they postpone childbearing until they complete their education and then spend a dozen years establishing their careers. It’s counterintuitive to delay having children until after the woman’s best chances for conception have passed. There is also the added benefit of not being the dad who asks for the senior discount at the ice cream stand after his kid’s t-ball game. And think about the weirdness of picking up both Children’s Tylenol and your Low-T medicine at the pharmacy.
For many couples, living together before marriage is a cover for their unwillingness to make a mature, adult commitment. I’ll first refer back to my previous point about God’s plan for sexual abstinence before marriage and monogamy within as the best route to a happy and healthy marriage. But in addition to that, I believe that cohabitation sets a very unhealthy pattern that leads to a culture of divorce. Living together before marriage to “see if we’re compatible” is practicing failure. The unspoken (or sometimes spoken) agreement is that if it doesn’t work out or if my partner doesn’t fulfill my desires, we can both walk away. It’s built on a foundation of selfishness and flies in the face of “For better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health, forsaking all others, until death parts us.” Marriage is fun, fulfilling, and amazing, but it’s also really, really hard sometimes. There can be long periods of time when couples must wade through difficult periods of medical issues, family crises, financial problems, and routine boredom. Cohabitation gives couples license to walk away in the face of those difficulties, with the excuse that “they must not be compatible” or it “ wasn’t meant to be.” In contrast, marriage (technically) requires a commitment to permanence. Couples that survive and endure through dozens of years of marriage do so not because their marriages aren’t touched by trials, tragedies, and heartache, but because they manage to navigate these difficulties and persevere, fiercely resolute in the commitment they have made to one another and, for many, to God.
In his counter-cultural book Dating with Integrity, John Holzmann describes the solemnity of the vows, beginning at the moment of engagement:
To be betrothed means to be promised. People used to speak of “plighting” (pledging, promising) one’s “troth.” Troth means faithfulness, loyalty, promise. But whether we call it engagement or betrothal, the main thing people need to attend to is that their promises are true and they will do whatever they must in order to fulfill them. At the point of engagement or betrothal the great transition should occur. It is here that one should make one’s vows and plan to keep them. Before one makes a vow, all one’s questions should be answered concerning whether or not he or she intends to fulfill it. It is at the point of engagement that the big shift should occur between being “mere” friends to being committed to one another as husband and wife for the rest of our lives.
Couples in trial marriages via cohabitation arrangements refuse to make such commitments and instead enter into agreements that are, at their root, open-ended and even selfish. Experiencing one or more of these relationships/arrangements teaches couples to take the easy way out when the going gets rough. Rather than making semi-sincere vows (which, by the way, can also be made or implied in non-cohabitating serious relationships), perhaps we need a return to what our grandparents practiced: Avoiding the “practice marriage” trap by marrying young, embracing the gravity and solemnity of the marriage commitment, waiting until the wedding day to move in together, and staying together for life.
There are many factors to consider when deciding when and whom to marry: the maturity of the individuals, their financial independence, whether they have a realistic view of marriage, and, of course, whether they’ve found the right person to marry. The bottom line is that what we’ve been doing for the last fifty years isn’t really working. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the way we do marriage is failing miserably, evidenced by the colossal divorce rate. It’s time to examine our modern marriage paradigms and ask if we can learn a thing or two from generations past. While I’m not suggesting that early marriage is right for everyone, I am saying that we shouldn’t automatically dismiss it out of hand just because current conventional wisdom says it’s a bad idea and the “experts” tell us that we need to spend a decade or more of our adulthood “finding ourselves” and learning to love ourselves more.
The “evangelical” church I went to in high school and college extolled these four points (mentioned in the quoted article) for “single people” (both men and women) —
– Learning to love herself and accept her self-worth
– Time to become her own person
– Benefit of knowing who she is
– Experiencing life as her own complete person
As a result, there was very little serious courtship and marriage going on within that age cohort (late teens/early to mid twenties). The “Evangelical Christian” culture of the time (many of its books were sold at our local college Bible bookstore) placed heavy emphasis on “the gift of singleness” and only very light mention, if any, on the importance of marriage and child rearing. This was the late 1970s - early 1980s.
In order for this to be feasible, the education system must be dismantled and children should be taught to be mature and responsible, and educated and trained well enough to be able to support themselves. Now we have people being students until they are in their thirties, and when they finally graduate, they still can’t make a living.
It’s tough today. There aren’t as many good people out there and there hasn’t been for 25 or 30 years. If you don’t find that person by 25 or maybe 30 it gets real tough, real fast.
I was one of the ones who tried but what I mostly ran into was crap. It’s easy to be down on yourself till I realized that for most women today in the first half of their lives, for all the talk and bluster, they wouldn’t have married most men of their grandfather’s or great-grandfathers generation, simply because they wouldn’t have considered them men, or someone worth pursuing.
Most today are self-centered financial predators looking for the best deal they can get. Their vision of what a man should be is so far from the mark that it’s not worth pursuing. There’s only so much baggage and screwed up ideas in a person that you can tolerate before you have to say ‘no deal.’ I find most potentially interesting women today downright offensive.
And seeing some of the guys today, I can’t imagine how hard it must be for the women too. All I can say is if you find the special person, latch on and don’t let go.
My wife has now gotten to that age where she needs to be ironed.
My feelings are it's a mixed bag. When younger you are more distracted by basically everything.
Older...more experience and hopefully more stable but the big one...you die earlier and likely have less energy
But you can make up for the energy by communicating with them to train them and enrich them how to grow up to be men or ladies and today prepare them for the inevitable politics by other means that lies ahead. I spend all my free time with my last 3 or their mommy
Myself...I would have never been faithful to women as a young man. I realized that and put it off.
But it does have a price.
For someone like me, marrying early 30s with a mid 20s gal is about perfect.
But to each his own.
My folks married at 23 and for life faithfully.
My grandparents and so forth even younger and most often stayed true.
Today is a different and in many ways worse world.
Beware.
For a lot of couples (not all) “happily married” is oxymoronic
Or to the point where it would be difficult for a young woman to find a man who hasn't had 20 sexual partners by age 25.
Societies fail if they believe in a delayed marriage. If the US falls into this trap it will go the way of Europe - lower birthrates, increased immigration, and increased Islamization.
You make some truly great points.
“My advice now is, find someone good enough as soon as possible and make it work.”
You have to hae something to work with. Personally, I’m not looking for anything that’s diseased and covered with tats and piercings; ridden hard and put away wet at a minimum.
It’s the reality we face in many cases. I pass.
A good post.
If we stop romanticizing a perfect life and “happy searching for your self” for years as a singleton, more people would get married. This would lower the divorce rate long term, probably boost the birth rate AND shift a lot of single people to conservative (because single women tend Democrat while married tend Republican).
It’s marriage that is supposed to make you “complete”, you don’t get “complete” on your own.
Right, but the church/Evangelical Christian culture was pushing the idea that you had to become "complete" on your own, before you could get married. You had to be "perfect" in order to be married. How could anyone, male or female, ever be perfect enough?
Or they decide maybe going gay isn't so bad, at least they get some that way.
While I am joking, but then again, there may very well be a grain of truth in that statement.
That is as clear and accurate a synopsis that can be written on this subject.
Bravo!
Of course, guys usually tend to overstate those numbers.
Wow, the range of emotions on this topic is fascinating!
To all those who are in successful marriages, congratulations!
To the poster who made the ugly comment that women are peak at 20 and ‘downhill’ after that, wow! Just wow! Some narrow thinking there dude. Try meeting and having a heartfelt conversation with one of us ‘older and mature’ women, you might gain some much needed insight.
I can speak from experience on the topic this article address. Being young and single in the decadent 80’s was something I wouldn’t wish on my children. It was ALL about the stupid Cosmo magazine and the garbage Helen Gurly Brown was pushing and young women ate that sh** up. We were so sure that we on the cutting age of what ‘hip’ was...some were living together, postponing marriage and so convinced we could ‘have it all’.
There were no realistic guidelines to what made a successful relationship, it was all about being free and single. We were so sure our version of free love was superior to those of the 60’s. As a result, we floundered about just going with the flow of working, living on our own, or not, meeting and dating all the other lost souls of our time.
My ex and I did chose to live together before marriage, much to my parents horror! Speaking only for myself, yes, it does give you that freedom to walk away. Even then we were told of the statistics of divorce being higher of those who lived together. Sadly, it proved to be true in our case.
What I witness currently, is my children and their peers are far more interested in finding a mate earlier and enjoying a stronger marriage then some of their parents had.
Now divorced and in my ‘50’s’ it is a very strange land in regards to dating again. Sometimes frustrating yet always interesting.
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