My H and I met at 19 and married at 22 - 30 years ago! H completed a PhD, I completed 2 Masters degrees. We both achieved a certain amount of success in our careers, raised 2 kids (fostered 2 more) and now we are living abroad as empty nesters. IMO, if you are realistic with your expectations and are both willing to communicate and compromise, I see no reason to have an “age requirement” on marriage. Just realize that marriage has its ups and downs. As my grandmother (married 60 years) put it, “Some mornings you wake up and think - I just can’t stand this person lying next to me. But you get up and keep going and keep working at it and you get through the rough patches.” Most problems in marriage can be fixed if both people are commited and willing to put in the work.
OP, people react to your engagement relative to your age because there has been a trend toward delaying marriage over the past several generations. Now when people get engaged while still being able to say the word “teen” as part of their age it is considered unusual. There is no way of predicting how your relationship will proceed or whether or not it will survive the test of time. You can make all sorts of plans or timelines, but life has a way of being rather messy at times, and some of those messes are easier to clean up than others.
For what it is worth, I married young, before my junior year in college. I was in love, but more than that my husband and I were estranged from families and impoverished. So our marriage helped us pool resources and survive. Getting educations was always a priority for both of us and despite a lot of hardship and debt, we both eventually finished our PhDs. We did not, however, have a child until I was almost 36. We are still married, and happily so. We have been through a lot together, he is my best friend. Our beginning was not all planned out, nor has the path our lives have taken. We have lived through two bouts of cancer.
Can it work out for you? Of course. Will it be easy or go smoothly? Maybe maybe not. There are no certainties in life.
Would I prefer it if my own daughter waits until she is a bit older to be in a serious relationship, and even older before she gets married? Definitely yes.
Romani, I can relate entirely to what EVD is saying. We found out once our D came along that our marriage couldn’t handle two highly demanding careers (trial lawyer & academic physician-researcher who is mostly on soft $). We didn’t have the support of local family to fall back on. Child, home and dog responsibilities fell to me. It has worked these past 25 years, but not without some substantial periods of resentment along the way (I totally empathize @PNWedwonk).
Some of the things that carried us through: We really wanted to stay married to each other; we didn’t deny the rough patches when they came up, we dealt with them; and because we didn’t meet until we were in our thirties, we had a good sense of who we were as individuals.
My advice to OP is to wait a few years. The first big challenge may come when one of you gets a great job offer in another city, and the other has to leave a job he/she really likes.
*I know MaineLonghorn already gave you the (very correct) answer. I want to add two things that I think are good to remind everyone of sometimes, well at least the first thing is for eveyone. Which is that commenting on how we moderate on the public boards is a violation of the Terms of Service. I am a little surprised @MaineLonghorn didn’t ding you for that, she is much harder in her interpretation of that rule on those violations than I am. A strict constructionist, if you will. The point is that in the future, that would be better done as a private message to me so you don’t get a violation. But only when I am acting as a moderator, which you can tell when I do all italics. If my post is in regular font, then I am posting as a general member and you can take all the shots you want, within the Terms of Service for civility (be gentle, please, even though it isn’t my first time).
The second is just to answer your question, which is no, I hold the vast majority of posters in very high regard, even those (and sometimes especially those) with whom I disagree. It never would have occurred to me to have to post that note if the first poster responding to the OP had not been very rude and condescending towards her.
Hope that clears things up for this specific instance and for the future. Thanks!*
OP - my now-H and I started dating when I was a college freshman and he a college senior (we were 18 and 22 - we are 3 years apart school-wise but 4 years apart age-wise, as I was young for my grade and he was old for his).
We got engaged when I was a soph, at the age of 19. We got married shortly after my college graduation; I was 21. I was sole support for a while as he was in med school. We will have our 30th anniv next year.
I was too young, it is not a knock on how it turned out, but I would have benefited greatly from dating around / playing the field vs being tied down so young. I would have also benefited greatly from living on my own post-college vs going from my parents’ house into marriage. There’s something to be said for independence, esp for a woman.
We didn’t live together before marriage (it was more “shocking” in those days). In hindsight, we maybe should have done that too. We both have said we would encourage our children to live with a potential mate before marriage.
OP, you say “Why wait?” I say, “Why rush?” If you’re truly meant to be together, you’ll be together whether you are dating, together, and married.
And FWIW, Michigan is not the #1 public school in the country.
I fell in love on a study abroad program when I was 20. Three years long distance relationship later, I went back and married him. Literally with having noone from my side in attendance or even having met/vetted him. He had no money, no credentials, no college education. Was it difficult to sell this marriage to everyone else? No, I didn’t much care. Did my family accept him? Yes because I didn’t really ask for their opinion. The truth is, only his older brother, my older brother and some distant relatives gave opinions, which we summarily ignored. If you know this is what you are planning to do, have your reasons, then forget about caring about others opinions. Ps married 29 yrs, 4 kids.
Married at age 20 to my college sweetheart when he was 22. Both in college, both ended up graduating. We are still married 32 years later. Even though we love each other dearly, there were plenty of times we didn’t like each other during those early years! Thankfully, Divorce was not an option in our minds, so we were more willing to work through the issues, compromise, and/or wait it out.
Regrets? Not having some experiences that other friends had, like backpacking in Europe after college graduation, or setting up my first apartment and having the confidence of living independently and making my own way. Not having more dating experiences that might have allowed me time to learn healthier ways to interact. Would I go back and change getting married so early? No, I think living independently for too long would have had me too set in my ways to accommodate a spouse. We learned together how to make it work.
Our first year of marriage was a roller coaster of emotions, as we figured out how to live with another person. I wish we had invested in more extensive marriage counseling before getting married. We were too much “in love” to think about long-term decisions. We learned later that different childhood experiences, different patterns for how to budget, spend/save money, vacation expectations, etc. can clash even between people who love each other dearly.
My advice is to find a way to integrate marriage counseling into your pre-wedding schedule. Have the talks now regarding what happens if one of you gets a great job offer across the country and the other wants to stay close to family. We joke that our only pre-nup agreement was me asking my H if he planned to go work in Silicon Valley, bc I just wasn’t up for living on the opposite coast from my family. I was up for a temporary grad school relocation, but not a permanent move so far from my family. Fortunately, my H felt the same way, and his family was in the same region of the country as mine.
Unplanned pregnancies can tear your logical, detailed 5 year plan to shreds. Discuss now how you will handle this situation. There will be sacrifices, but of course I believe parenthood is a precious gift. And think through the “boring details” like saving, Roth IRAs, budgeting. That is a regret on mine that I wish I could go back and change.
Best of luck to you both!
My one and only concern is that there is no mention of love or assurance he is “the one and only”. Perhaps I’m the odd one, but I dated many people and when I fell in love with dh, it was such a revelation, hit me like a ton of bricks that this man was truly meant to be for me. I still love him dearly after 38 years. I was 26 when we married and now I think THAT was young, LOL.
Best wishes. I do hope you have a wonderful love for each other. Everything else certainly seems to be thoroughly planned out.
I have to admit I don’t believe in the “one and only”. I think I could have been perfectly happy with either of the guys I dated seriously before dh. I met my husband junior year in college. We were together seven years before getting married - with three years on opposite coasts and one year where I was traveling around the country with no address at all. We are still married. My parents got married at 18 and 20 respectively. They stayed married more than 50 years.
I would caution you that children change everything. Never think that children are a good way to cement a shaky relationship. I’ve seen friends do that, it doesn’t work.
This is good to know, as I wasn’t really consciously aware of the italics thing. I just thought you were making some general advance warning on the OP’s topic, as zoosermom probably did also. Not commenting here on the moderating, just on not having realized that was what you were doing.
Callcash, the comment on Michigan is irrelevant to the discussion and doesn’t serve to make you look good. The OP is asking in good faith.
Not to derail, but this is appalling. Your H should be proud of you for focusing on your family while still managing to have a meaningful work life and contribute to the household finances. He should even, perhaps, be proud of himself for doing well enough in his own career to allow you to stay home and to take a different path. Not to mention the sacrifice you made to accommodate making HIS career the priority one. Sheesh!
I’d like to point out that all poster who married early met their spouse in college not earlier. OP on the other hand met her fiance during HS freshman year. I think we are talking about different “early”.
Re: unplanned pregnancies… in the year 2015 this really should not be a concern. IUDs and implants are as effective as sterilization.
Midwestdad, I can understand how a kid would complicate things. I don’t understand how a marriage would. But these two things are not necessarily related. I’ll probably be married at least 5 years before kids come (and at that point we’ll have lived together for nearly 10).
I’d like to point out that all poster who married early met their spouse in college not earlier. OP on the other hand met her fiance during HS freshman year. I think we are talking about different “early”. >>
DH & I started dating in 10th grade. We went to different colleges, neither of us had a car and long distance phone calls were expensive, swe wrote letters. We got married after graduation and he spent 27 years in the military, with the separations, etc that entails. Our 30th anniversary was in August. But we now realize how young we were!
Like cap, I met my husband in high school. We started at different colleges but my first school wasn’t a good for several reasons and I transferred to the big university where he was. We married during my junior year in college. Money was tight, but all of our friends were married grad students with no money so we didn’t care. (I was the “baby” of the bunch). We will celebrate our 40th anniversary soon. He’s still my best friend and my rock during hard times.
Whether one is ready to be married at a relatively young age or not is a YMMV depending on one’s maturity, taking some time to give some serious thought to the implications of entering into a marriage for both oneself and SO, and willingness to make some serious compromises in consideration of one’s SO throughout the term of a given relationship.
One reason why some parents and older adults are concerned when the subject of young marriage does come up is that the vast majority of folks at 18-21 aren’t mature enough or taken the time to be introspective to assess themselves and their SO on those points. Also, people can and do change over time or may function differently in a post HS/college job situation with the different and previously unforeseen demands and stresses they may place on the relationship.
That’s one reason why some posters are on point when they state one’s odds are more chancy if one marries relatively young rather than waiting until one’s older as the odds are people are more likely(not always guaranteed) to take some time to look seriously into themselves and their SOs when one’s older than when younger.
In my social circle, the numbers of successful marriages from those who started dating in early college or younger are extremely low. Of a dozen or so I know of, only two are still together in stable well-adjusted marriages today with most divorcing within 10 years after our HS graduation.
And it’s not due to finances or one partner “lagging” on the career/job front as all of them had and continue to have highly successful careers. Ironically, it’s the very fact some were highly successful in highly demanding careers and had problems dealing with issues which cropped up in the marriage as a result* that factored into some of the divorces.
- Spouse who worked less hours feeling resentful at spouse who by necessity of profession/job had to routinely stay late in the office and/or travel most of the days of the week...especially if there are issues because such jobs do not allow for communication through the course of what could be an excessively long workday**, couples being unable to tamp down their professional competitive streak/one upsmanship in similar/same career fields which ended up being corrosive to the marriage, spouse who worked long heavy hours feeling resentful at spousal demands for chores without accounting for the exhausting nature of the job and long hours, etc.
** 12 or more hours in a workday which is common in some areas of engineering/technology, biglaw, finance, business organizational consulting, ibanking, etc.
And more importantly, it’s not fair to the children who are born into that situation. Adults and those who are close to being adults have the choice to enter/work through/end relationships according to the situations and options before them. Children brought into relationships don’t have any choice in the matter and that should be seriously considered by the couples concerned before bringing them into the world.
Thanks for the clarification OP!
It’s hard to answer this type of question without projecting one’s own experience/issues on to it. My answer to “why wait” is because - if you get it wrong - it hurts not just you but potentially many other people too. As someone else said, you don’t know what you don’t know.
My early 20’s marriage ended badly. It still hurts 25 years later. Innocent people get hurt, but of course life goes on. But again, that’s ME and my own experience which could (and would probably) be vastly different from yours. My parents got married as teenagers and are still married.
Life is messy and hard and glorious and wonderful. I just like to stack the odds on my side, when I take time to think about something. I was very, very immature at 22. At 25 or 27, I suspect I would have known myself better.
I wish you peace and clarity on this issue. Don’t worry about what others think. Worry about what you think. And really think and pray (if you’re spiritual) and be intentional. It’s great that you’re open to listening to opposing POVs on the issue. But ultimately the decision is yours and your beloved.
I don’t think there’s a magic recipe for a guaranteed happy marriage. Every morning when you wake up it’s up to the two of you to make it a better marriage or a worse one.
My husband and I have been married for 22 years, and together for 27 (we met my freshman year of college, I broke up with him and moved to Italy, then we got back together over the phone and had a long distance relationship for about a year, then I moved in with him, then we got engaged, married, then had kids about 5 years after we were married). None of these facts guarantee a good marriage or a bad marriage, though-we’ve had friends who’ve done everything right get divorced, and everything wrong remain together. Like others have said, marriages have cycles of it being easier and more difficult, and keeping the fact that you want the best for the other person and that you believe the other person loves you as much as you love them helps to weather the rough cycles.
The one big piece of advice I would give you is to wait to have kids until you’re in your late 20’s, at the earliest. We were super busy having fun and going all over the world and finishing college (I am STILL finishing college,lol) and becoming more, um, evolved and introspective people. By this I don’t mean partying-we worked way too hard, were too poor, and were too health-conscious for that to be part of our life-but we were changing a ton, and we made conscious efforts to change in the right direction.
I think if you add kids in too early, you sort of ossify your relationship and your roles before you are ready, and that can add a lot of pressure that the kids will bear the brunt of.
We got married when I was 23 and he was 25, so it was early, but not so early that we couldn’t do the adults things in life. Like renting cars. I kid, but you get what I mean. People won’t treat you like adults because you’re married-if you’re looking for that to legitimize or adulterize your relationship, it won’t. Just don’t worry about the marriage thing so much-once you get into your 22’s and 23’s and up, it becomes less of a “hey look I’m a grownup” thing that you have to prove to people. We could have gotten married at your age, we just didn’t need the added pressure of trying to prove to everyone that we were grown up enough to do it. We knew, but we also knew we’d do it when it wasn’t something that we had to prove to others because who needs to deal with that?
So, OP, good luck, have fun, work hard, and bone up on the four love languages and the four horsemen of the marriage apocalypse-knowing those will help a ton with maintaining a strong bond as you continue to change through your lives.