<p>Where we are it seems as if families sort of push the whole dating thing in high school, and then you’re supposed to go to college and meet your spouse. “Ring by spring” as they used to say. I thought that was the way it was in the 1950’s but I’m seeing it more and more. I’m not sure I’d want my kids to marry a college sweetheart? Seems so young and kids are so immature still at that age? Don’t young marriages have more of a likelihood of failing? What do you think about it?</p>
<p>Depends on the marriage. I married at 22. It will be 31 years this fall. Of all the kids in the family, the only one who go divorced is the one who married in her 30’s. That’s not proof, but I don’t think one can generalize. I think sometimes, people who marry later marry because they WANT to be married, but it’s just not the right person. And sometimes young people are not mature enough yet. Each case is different. My 25 yr old is married, my 29 year old is not. Seems right for each of them</p>
<p>I agree, I met Bullet the day of my hs graduation, dated through college, engaged 4 months after graduation, and have been married for almost 21 yrs. The only divorce in our family is his brother who got married closer to 30, his sister recently reconciled with her husband and they got married when she was 32. I don’t put so much weight on age, but the maturity of the couple. Getting married because all of our friends are, so I guess we should is not smart. Getting married because you can’t imagine not having them in your life everyday, and raising a family with them is smart.</p>
<p>It is very individual. We married at 22 after dating for two years, and will be celebrating our 35th anniversary in a few days. Haven’t regretted it a minute.</p>
<p>After marrying, we both went on to get more college degrees, including PhDs (both of us). We postponed having children for a looooong time, which helped with school. Having each other for support was helpful. Not having to play the dating game was also helpful.</p>
<p>Both my brothers and I married our college sweethearts. One brother married shortly after graduation, the other brother and I waited longer (3 or 4 years for him, 6 years for me.) Worked out fine for all of us. </p>
<p>My Mom married at 18 while still in college :eek: and she and my Dad have been married over 50 years.</p>
<p>My brother married his college sweetheart who he met at 19…married right after graduation, and they’ve been married close to 40 years, but that was in the 1960’s. Are kids different now?</p>
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<p>I think that is a fair question, and of course many things about the world are different now than when I started college. </p>
<p>However, I knew enough to recognize a great find when I encountered one, and I would have been a fool to think I had to keep looking around just because we were both young and–at that time–penniless.</p>
<p>Sometimes I suspect too many young people are convinced they MUST keep looking around because other people will think they are foolish for committing at a young age.</p>
<p>My son has been dating a girl since just after hs graduation (two years ago). She transferred to the same college as he attends after freshman year. They make a great pair, and both have their own interests and activities. Who knows about the future? Neither I nor my husband are inclined to discourage them from remaining together, if they decide to do so.</p>
<p>My spouse and I were married a week after we graduated from college. We’re recently celebrated our 25th anniversary. Yes, we were young and foolish, but also knew we wanted to start out in the world with the other one right there. In many ways we “grew up” together and that shared history is part of our bond. </p>
<p>I don’t know that I would be thrilled if either of our children followed the same path (marrying immediately after college). My concern would not be that they were marrying their college sweetheart and were too young to know better. My concern would be because I know first hand how difficult those years of establishing careers, etc. can be. Finding a lifetime partner can come at any age. Whether one stays with that partner depends, in part, on whether the two can grow together and accept changes in the other.</p>
<p>My H and I married a week after we finished undergrad, 35 years this year. Most of our college friends also married that year or the year following. It was the norm in those days. I don’t see that today with my Ds and their friends/peers. My D who is married dated her husband in h/s but then they split up for the college years and reconnected afterwards. She was 27 and he was 29 when they got married. My other Ds are all involved in relationships with young men they’ve met in college, one is engaged and will be 26 the year they marry. My married D has a few friends who are married, or now engaged, but many are still single. </p>
<p>Maybe part of the reason that kids don’t rush into marriage as soon after college as they used to is that living together isn’t the issue it once was. When I was in college, everyone lived together with their significant other, in some sense, and it was just never discussed with parents. After graduating, that was more difficult to hide so I think a lot of couples just naturally planned to marry. Today, it is much more accepted, by most, that kids will live with their significant other, married or not.</p>
<p>So, yes, I think things are different now than they were when I was that age.</p>
<p>I met my wife when I was a sophomore and she a freshman in college. We got involved romantically right around the time I graduated, and got married five years later. Only two of which we spent living in the same place.</p>
<p>We have friends who met in college and married right after they graduated. They have been married for 30 years, and may not make it to 31. But at this point it’s hard to blame it on marrying too young.</p>
<p>I think there may be something of a mini-generation gap here. Many people I know who are in their late 50s - over 60 now married right after college, and few of those marriages survived the social upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s. The people in my cohort are only a few years younger, but really missed the height of the war protests and “Sexual Revolution”, and we caught the AIDS crisis in our late 20s. Also, even those of us who married college sweethearts didn’t necessarily do it right after college. Anyway, comparatively few of those marriages have blown up. Yet.</p>
<p>Most of my peers–friends/cousins/sibs-- married in the 21-26 age range back in the late 80s. Most often out of college a couple years. I can’t think any divorces. I think when people marry older (30+) there can be a problem with individuals being too “set in their ways” and less willing to “bend.” Also, the healthiest time to have kids is in your 20’s, so if that’s in the plan, people shouldn’t put off marriage for too long.
More recently, I’ve noticed a trend toward longer engagements, more elaborate weddings and living together. (Which was NOT accepted in my culture). </p>
<p>I would be more concerned if my kids wanted to marry in the 18-20 age range–those tend to have a much higher divorce rate. If they are out of college, fine.</p>
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<p>I agree that there is a generation gap, because my experience doesn’t match the other posts so far. When I graduated, I stayed close to a group of eight women. Six married college boyfriends within 18 months of graduation, one married someone she met right after college, and one married her college boyfriend 10 years later. She is the only one of us who’s still married to her first husband; they really “re-met” each other after some years apart. My first husband and I should have been friends and not felt the pressure (self-imposed) to marry, but men and women weren’t often just best friends back then. Still, my sense of who I was as an individual was not evolved or strong enough to get married, and I did not have good relationship role models. Having a successful marriage is harder when those two things are lacking. That can happen now just as easily as 30-35 years ago.</p>
<p>atomom: Married again to the love of my life in my late 30s and had my first and only child at 41. Still not set in my ways (mostly). I’ve always been very grateful I didn’t have children in my first marriage. Readiness to be parents is the first consideration; it’s risky to marry because it’s “time” to have children. My college friends and I joked that the best part of our 25th reunion was being there with our second (and final) husbands! It would have been great to get it right the first time, but our “do-overs” have all been happy endings.</p>
<p>One of the advantages of marrying young is that it’s easier to overlook and accomadate negatives about the other person. When you’re older, it’s a lot easier to have a shopping list and a list of things that you don’t want making it harder to find anyone that you will settle for.</p>
<p>One of the nice things about meeting in college and marrying is that you’re more likely to line up more closely financially and educationally and anything that adds to compatibility can be helpful.</p>
<p>Despite the wonderful histories of people posting here, young marriages are far more likely to fail than are first marriages by people who are older. </p>
<p>Virtually all people whom I know who got married by age 24 had marriages that ended in divorce. Some ended within less than 2 years. I got married at age 28, and will have been married for 30 years next month. I shudder to think what kind of person I would have married if I had married in college or right after college.</p>
<p>Met my now dh when I was a freshman and he was a senior in college. We dated all the way through and got married after I graduated (he was in grad school at the time).
My friends all got married in early / mid-twenties, but we all delayed having children til late twenties or early thirties. That was the norm in our social group.</p>
<p>If I had to do it over again, I would have lived by myself for a time after college instead of getting married immediately, and / or we should have lived together for a while before getting married. I think the first year of marriage was very hard precisely because of that.</p>
<p>DH and I got married at 22; he was a year out of school and I was still finishing school. We were married four days before my 23rd birthday, when my medical insurance ran out. (It was a BAD idea to transfer in senior year, but I was dealing w/a lot of stuff and desperately needed to get out of there. The stuff just followed me. That is a BIG regret on my part.)</p>
<p>We didn’t have kids for seven years, so while we were the first among DH’s cohort to get married, we were NOT among the first to have kids. I was an old maid compared to HS friends.</p>
<p>We were compatible on many, many levels and had spent a year long-distance where we chose to talk on the phone and hour a day rather than fly back and forth once a month. We still managed to see each other every 2-3 months, but the daily phone conversations set a standard for communication in our relationship.</p>
<p>I wish I had lived on my own for a while. I needed to be able to define myself more clearly. OTOH, the economics were such that this likely would have forced me back to my parents’ southern town, where career track jobs were extremely rare. It was the last place on the planet I wanted to be. DH and I did not see the point in waiting to get married when we knew this was it.</p>
<p>A quick Google found this article, which is 20 years old, but the data may still hold true.</p>
<p>"All three people represent a demographic trend that has profound emotional and financial effects on millions of young Americans, according to social scientists and family therapists. Contrary to the widespread perception of divorce as a midlife phenomenon, more marriages dissolve before the age of 30 than at any other time. The divorce rate for young couples is more than double the national average. ‘The Most Likely Time’</p>
<p>While the marriage rate for never-before-wed women has declined precipitously since 1970 and women’s median age at their first marriage is now higher than ever, the incidence of divorce among people in their 20’s also reached record highs in the early 1980’s, with nearly 40 percent of all divorces occurring among couples under 30.</p>
<p>‘‘The 20’s are the most likely time, in terms of rates, to be getting divorced,’’ said Barbara Foley Wilson, a demographer with the National Center for Health Statistics. The center estimated that in 1984, 841,000 people between the ages of 20 and 29 were divorced, a 38 percent increase since 1970.</p>
<p>Changing marital roles, the passage of no-fault divorce laws and the greater social acceptability of divorce, along with what therapists describe as unrealistic ideas about marriage, poor communication skills and greater narcissism among young adults have contributed to the increase in early marital breakups. And along with the emotional scars, divorce at an early age can have economic effects so devastating, especially for young mothers, that an entire new impoverished subclass has emerged. Later Divorces Are Different</p>
<p>Many experts also say that divorce in the 20’s is quite different from that among older couples. Whereas people who divorce later in life are often the victims of a spouse’s ‘‘midlife crisis,’’ according to Paul C. Glick, a sociologist at Arizona State University, ‘‘those most prone to divorce marry in their teens and early 20’s.’’
[DIVORCE</a> AT A YOUNG AGE: THE TROUBLED 20’S - The New York Times](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/12/style/divorce-at-a-young-age-the-troubled-20-s.html]DIVORCE”>http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/12/style/divorce-at-a-young-age-the-troubled-20-s.html)</p>
<p>I was married at 20, stopped college to work and later when I had kids and quit working went back to finish my degree. Never less than an A when I was paying for a babysitter as well as tuition!</p>
<p>One of my DDs has been dating a wonderful guy for 5 years and as they graduate it would be natural to discuss marriage, but she is applying for grad school and he is out and has a job. There is no school for her available in the area of his job, so they either have to do more long distance time or he wouuld require a transfer or they move on. I am not sure what will happen, but if she were not pursuing grad school they would likely get married.</p>
<p>I got married after soph year at 20. DH(23) had been out of college one year.<br>
I continued college and graduated three years later (lost some credit in transfer).<br>
Will have been married 27 years next month. S1 was born five years after we married, two years after my college grad. </p>
<p>S1 just graduated fr. college two weeks ago. He has a couple of friends who are getting married this summer. He doesn’t have a gf and has purposely avoided serious relationships in the last year due to his post grad job committment (military). If he was involved with someone and wanted to marry, I wouldn’t stand in his way.</p>
<p>My parents married at 17 and 19 years old. My mom had just graduated high school. They were married forty-seven years before my dad passed away at the age of sixty-six (renal cancer). My mom was gone less than two years later at the age of sixty-five (it’ll be one year ago this june) from early onset alzheimer’s. I do think, in most cases, that’s too young to marry. However, I also look at my parents’ life, and they were able to have three children, see them through college and all married with eight grandchildren to enjoy for many years. In their case, I know they wouldn’t have had it any other way. </p>
<p>zebes</p>
<p>P.S. They put themselves through college with two children and a third one on the way just as my mom graduated. Where there’s a will …</p>
<p>P.S.S. My h and I have been married twenty-two years. We got married over Christmas break while in grad school.</p>