I met my wife at 37 and married at 39. Best decision I ever didn’t intentionally make :)
But looking back, I had a TON of growing up to do before I was ready to seriously commit to marriage the way I personally view it. Pair bonding for life. Sure, people, things and desired change, but I’ve watched far too many god awful divorces to ever want to go through that, so I wanted to be really sure and I totally was. It’s been an awesome 16 years.
I think everybody’s different. I mean, there do exist 23 year olds who are incredibly mature and fully formed as human beings, capable of making that kind of a Big Decision, but from what I’ve seen they’re pretty darn rare :)
Me 32, i dont have a fucking clue of what i want for the rest of my life. Maybe those couples that married in their early 20s wanted to explore together what they wanted in life. Good for them.
I understand the roots of marriage, but I want a partner who would be ok with parting ways in the future. We live once, why do we have to commit to 1 person for most of it? Things I enjoyed 5 years ago I don’t care for now. Tastes change.
Marriage isn’t for everybody, and that’s okay. As long as you aren’t stringing partners along who are looking to get married when you already know that you aren’t, then your choice doesn’t seem to be hurting anybody.
I’m 35 and married. Sure, tastes change, but my wife and I chose good partners in each other; we won’t hate each other or get irreparably sick of each other, we make a great team, and we understand each other’s limitations and are mature enough to ask for help. We let each other in. There is security and stability in marriage. I’m not great at meeting new people, so not having to go on another first date again is a huge relief for me. Making a good first impression is fucking exhausting. In contrast, I know how my wife is feeling pretty much just by glancing at her, and it’s really fulfilling to be on the same wavelength as my partner like that, especially because we’re also open communicators who can share the honest, fucked up feelings without worrying about judgment. So we’re basically each other’s therapist, but we share housework and meals and money, and we snuggle and kiss and fuck. I can understand that that’s not appealing to everybody, but it’s hard for me to imagine a version of myself who doesn’t want this. But again, it’s not for everybody, and it’s perfectly okay to not want it for yourself.
If you know you want to marry and have kids, and you know who you want to marry, it’s weird to wait, especially since you can avoid being a creaking old person who still has young kids.
The divorce rate among millennials is decreasing in the US compared to earlier generations. That said, reducing it to how long people are waiting to marry ignores a lot of other factors. For instance, low income couples are more likely to never marry, their relationships are less stable, and if they do get married they are more likely to get divorced.
What’s wrong with the divorce rate increasing? Like, no joke, is that not a good thing? More people getting out of bad relationships seems like a better outcome.
Wife an I met and got married when I was 25 and she was 19. We had some life experience and knew what we wanted. 15 years later, it’s still amazing, we’re still best friends and inseparable. When I met her I got this weird feeling, like I met someone I had somehow known all my life. It felt like I met my wife in a past life, and was immediately like “oh there you are!” When I met her in this one.
I was recently trying to talk a person online out of marrying someone once the two of them are both 18. It’s partly because they’re head-over-heels in love with their partner and partly to move out of the US to Canada to escape their trans hostile state. They are trans and their partner helped them through some rough patches. The couple is only now meeting in person for the first time after three years. It was a little frustrating talking to them because I’m a naturally cautious person. My husband and I took about five years from first date to cohabiting to wedding. They honestly sounded like your stereotypical love sick teenager.
I would agree with the general judgement of this cartoon. There’s going to be some survivor bias for marriages that worked young. I know a woman who married a man who was in his 50’s when she was 18, right out of high school. When he died, she never remarried. But you never hear much about the marriages where an 18-year-old deemed themselves “more mature than those other girls/boys” and it turned into a disaster. They typically don’t last that long and no one wants to talk about them much.
I married at 22 over 20 years ago did not regret a day… I think a happy marriage is just a lot of luck a lot of self reflection and effort. No matter the age it is not a self running maintenance free system
I met my wife in high-school, we married at 21/22, it’s going to be our 19th anniversary this year. So yeah, definitely go lucky, and I would discourage my kids from doing the same even though it worked great for us.
Very interesting perspective that you wouldn’t encourage your kids to do the same as you, why’s that?
To be honest if my kids married at 20 it’s not like I’d try to stop it, despite my reservations about it. I’d think it was a potential mistake but that’s coming from me as concern rather than disapproval.
At what age are you supposed to know what you want for the rest of your life? You will never have an answer to that in any capacity, and not just in marriage. You evolve as a person, you’ll never have a fixed desire for your whole life. And that’s the great thing about marriage and relationships, they also evolve. And it’s about who you want to try doing that with
I see/hear about marriages started at 30+ 40+ 50+ all the time that fail. I see people pivot careers and industries in the middle years of their life. People tastes change all the time as they get older. Let’s not pretend that when your brain finishes developing you suddenly have life figured out/know exactly what you want
I generally agree that getting married before 24 is a pretty risky move and you have to have thought it through very carefully, but the argument that “you don’t know what you want for the rest of your life” is not the reason why that is. It relates more to life experience/emotional capability/massive foresight. Marriage is more than just “wanting something for the rest of your life”, it’s a commitment, it’s not just some eternal desire you may/may not have
I feel like it might come from the fact most relationships are pretty short before you are 24. Few people hold onto long lasting relationships by that age and few (at the time) short ones develop into anything reliable.
A former classmate of mine met a guy and got married after knowing him almost a year, like right out of highschool. Last I heard of her they went through a messy divorce couple of years later, which we all saw coming and tried telling her about.
That sounds more like an issue with that person not being open/receptive to her peers advice. And I think this is true for many people beyond the age of 24 as well
If we make it to 24 that’d be 8 years of dating and id feel bad not marrying her by then. My only caveat is I want to be out of college by the time we marry tbh
I’ll probably still go to grad school but I’d atleast like my BS
That’s what we did, it just turned out that we were together for 7 years before everything fell in to place. We got out of college, got our careers in order, and bought a house. Then married the next year.
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