<p>My parents got married at 18 & 21 and neither of them went to college.</p>
<p>I don’t want to get married until after college…maybe grad school (I haven’t decided if I really wanna go to grad school yet). Anyway.</p>
<p>I wanna have a job and be able to financially support myself before I take on another person.</p>
<p>It is ironic that while gays are fighting for the right to get married, many young heterosexual couples seem to have little interest in legalizing/formalizing their own relationships. In the space of a generation, young people getting married to begin their lives together has gone from being the norm to an anomaly.</p>
<p>When we got married, we had just graduated from college, had one job between the two of us, and did not have two cents to our names. By today’s standards, we probably would have been expected to wait until we both had high-paying jobs, a house – and maybe a kid or two. Don’t know if it is because people are waiting longer to get married or it’s the reason people are waiting longer to get married, but most weddings we are invited to these days are huge expensive productions followed by exotic honeymoons. If we had waited until we could afford that, we would not be closing in on our 30th anniversary.</p>
<p>H and I got married last fall. He was 22 and had just graduated from college in June, and I was 23 and had graduated a year before that. We got engaged the summer after my graduation/his junior year in college. We began to be financially self-supporting (other than tuition for him) the year we were engaged – I mean, yeah, we had to live off of my grad student stipend only that year, and money was tight, but we both felt that was better than asking for financial help from our parents.</p>
<p>Like aibarr and her husband, we’ve been married less than a year, so I can’t point to a long history to prove my point, but I think that getting married at 23/22 was the right choice for us, both in terms of where we were in our relationship and where we were in our careers (I wanted to plan the wedding my first year in grad school before I started my thesis :)). If I could go back, I’d do everything exactly the same way.</p>
<p>Admittedly, if you get married at 23, you should be prepared to defend your relationship choices to random people – when I went to the DMV to change my name after getting married, the clerk clucked at me, “Oh, you’re both so young! Hmm, but you have good jobs.” (Apparently that made it okay.)</p>
<p>I’m a little concerned about getting through my first year of grad school while planning a wedding. So I’m glad you survived the experience :-)</p>
<p>this REALLY depends on their income and education, and most of all emotions. i think that their income should come first though, because who ever heard of a happily-ever-after with no financial backup? so basically #1 it’s up to them, and #2 you shouldn’t make this kind of decisions FOR them, just influence and guide them</p>
<p>My husband and I met during orientation week of college, started dating in January of freshman year and got engaged after junior year, setting the date for August after graduation. We didn’t even have jobs while planning the wedding and hoped to get teaching positions before we got married. Luckily we did, took a $500 honeymoon, and we have been together ever since. We will celebrate our 35th anniversary next month.</p>
<p>We were young, 21 and 22, and I would do it all over again!</p>
<p>DH and I met when I was 21, and he was 20 – second semester of junior year. Got married 20 months later – the first year was long distance, then I moved to Philly when we got engaged. DH graduated a semester early, so by the time we got married he had been working for a year and a half (he started working there the summer after junior year). </p>
<p>He started law school shortly before our third anniversary and after working for nearly five years. I was working FT and he worked summers – no help from parents for living expenses or tuition. It was a great adventure planning where we’d move, what paths we wanted our careers to take, etc. </p>
<p>We waited seven years for kids. While we were married VERY early among DH’s NY friends, I was a veritable old maid among my Georgia friends (four days short of 23). Many of our friends who married long after us beat us to kids, though.</p>
<p>Was I too young? Probably. I think I needed a couple more years to ripen on the vine and fend for myself.</p>
<p>I got married exactly 1 week after turning 22, immediately after college. Looking back, should we have waited? I would have to say yes. Though we have made it work for 33 years and counting, and though we were completely self-sufficient at the time, I do not think we were mature and had not yet had time to fully become ourselves before becoming a couple. We did not have kids until we had been married 15 years, and I tell my kids to wait until 25-26 years old before marriage, so they know themselves better before trying to understand someone else.</p>
<p>I find it hard to understand long engagements and/or putting off marriage until one’s life is perfectly settled. It seems to me that people now look to find someone who fits the life they’ve already got rather than changing their life to accomodate the person they love. I don’t know whether this is good or bad; I suspect it depends on the couple. Some would feel resentful for being “chained down” so to speak, while others would regret not having had a caring anchor.</p>
<p>Our older D just graduated from college in May and is getting married next month. She is 22, her fiance is 24, and they have dated three years. She had a job lined up before she graduated and started a week after graduation. Her fiance will be in the last year of graduate school in the fall. He has said that after next year, he will go wherever she wants to go to continue her education. She spent the second semester of her senior year studying (trying to keep a 4.0 - which she did!), planning a wedding, and looking for a job!</p>
<p>Did we hope she would date lots of fellas during college? Yes, but that’s never been her. Did we ever think she would be getting married at 22? NEVER! Do we feel she is too young? Yes, we do. But we also feel like she is very mature, always has been, and has found an exceptional young man to share her life with. Some people find their love at 22 (or younger!) and others at 40 or 50! You just never know when it’s going to happen.</p>
<p>H & I met when I was a freshman & he was a junior in college. We knew by the end of my freshman year that we would marry. We had a very mature relationship, giving each other plenty of room for other friends & interests. We didn’t get married until I graduated, but at 23 I was more than ready to be married to him. It’s been 25 wonderful years. </p>
<p>If the couple is mature enough to handle themselves in life, they are mature enough to make the decision to marry. If they aren’t financially set … or down with higher ed … they can make it work, anyway. It’s always a gamble, no matter when a couple gets married. If they are up for the challenge, wish them well.</p>
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<p>Four years in the same city, two with me in Champaign and him in Baton Rouge, one with me in Los Angeles and him in Baton Rouge. We were typically able to spend summers and academic breaks in the same city, though, which helped a lot. We now live happily together in the same city!</p>
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<p>No clerks clucked at me! I guess 25 is old…? Maybe 31 is old; he’s 31. I’ll blame him! ;)</p>
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Actually, it wasn’t half-bad – in my program, first year is spent doing rotations and taking classes, so I wasn’t as tied to the lab bench as I am now. Plus, as a grad student, you can meet with caterers and florists and such in the middle of the day and just work super-late or come in early. Flexible hours for the win!</p>
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Well, I think it doesn’t help that I look about 18 or 19. (I went to the DMV another time when I was 22, and the clerk informed me that, “honey,” I needed to bring my parent to do what I wanted to do, since I was under 18. I have bad luck with DMV clerks, I think.)</p>
<p>S’s g/f is doing an internship this summer. It’s a travel-intensive department of the company, and most of her co-workers are under 30 and single. They recently had a discussion about marriage and the co-workers’ consensus was that it would have been better to marry when they were young and in love rather than choosing to put their careers first. I guess the grass is always greener, but I thought it was interesting.</p>
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Do young people have a realistic understanding that they may be forgoing the possibility of having children when they do that? It concerns me that young adults are so focused on their educations and careers that they don’t think through the ramifications to their future family lives. Having children will be very important to most of them at some point, and it would be terribly sad to one day realize that they will never know that joy. </p>
<p>I found these statistics online. The first study is on the Hutterite population because they don’t use birth control.</p>
<p>[Age</a> And Infertility: The Biological Clock: Fact Or Fiction?](<a href=“http://www.dcmsonline.org/jax-medicine/2000journals/may2000/ageinf.htm]Age”>http://www.dcmsonline.org/jax-medicine/2000journals/may2000/ageinf.htm)
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<p>I know my story is uncommon, but I got married at 34. Yes, my first marriage. The 10 or 12 yrs before that I was owner of Dj service and typical of most Dj’s my primary income was in bars and providing light/sound and dj’s to bars. In one sense it was difficult to go on a “traditional date”. After all, my free time for such a date was usually Monday or Tuesday morning. “I’ll pick you up Monday morning and we’ll do it up big” rarely worked as most of the world works Monday morning, yet as a dj, I was always working evenings especially Fridays and Saturdays. Most of my free time began at 3 a.m.
Such a life did open up many other opportunities, dating and otherwise, for a young single fellow however that I’ll not detail. I wasn’t crying myself to sleep at night wishing I had a wife. I enjoyed a good life, a very good life. I knew me well enough to know I didn’t want to settle down with one unless I felt that one could make my very good life even better. I met her at 32, we married when I was 34, and I’ve had a great life since.
I soon got out of the dj business- at least performing personally, and not long after that a former dj of mine bought out my business.</p>