I recently attended a wedding of two best friends from high school. They met on their first day of high school… in 1975. In a society with strong social pressure to marry it seems likely that they’d have gotten married shortly after completing high school or college, presumably to the most compatible person they’d identified at that time. As members of the Me Generation, however, they were entitled to pursue a search for self-actualization with no time limit, including a search for the ideal partner. As it happened in this case, the 40-year delay didn’t result in finding anyone more compatible than they’d already identified in high school.
Would they have been happier if they could have spent their core adult years together? Married at an age when it was still biologically possible to have children?
Musicologists say that Mozart did better work because he operated within constraints established by Haydn. Is it possible that Americans would do better with a few more constraints?
[Scorecard on the two most recent weddings that I’ve attended, both within the last couple of years… One wedding was in Paris. The couple remains together. One was in Massachusetts. The wife sued the husband a year later.]
Separately, this wedding was held at a Colorado ski resort, with events at 10,200′ and 9,400′ above sea level. At least one third of the guests who had flown in from sea level were suffering from altitude sickness (not me, though; I spent three nights in Denver before heading up to nosebleed territory).
Maybe it just took 40 years for the man to attain enough status to marry her. Marriage to highschool sweethearts sounds terrible because there were so many changes afterwards. Knew a few of them who got divorces, the same as the average.
Was this a first marriage for both of them?
Why don’t you ask them instead of gossiping on your blog?
Last night I dreamed of my first serious girlfriend. We were together and committed from the age of 17 to 22, over 30 years ago She dumped me a month after I graduated from college. I was making good money and ready to plan for our marriage. I had fleeting thoughts throughout today wondering how my life would have turned out had we stayed together, got married, and had children.
ScarletNumber: It was his first marriage. She had been previously married, but with no children and I’m not sure for how long.
The old saw that a maid becomes old at twenty-five is a good one. One learns to love and get along in marriage. The raising of children confirms the union. The sooner the whole business gets started, the better.
Young people now depend on the sorting algorithms of tinder and okcupid to find a mate. I do not know that these algorithms produce more happiness than a Yente.
Cue Tevye’s daughters…
https://youtu.be/59Hj7bp38f8
My wife and I met senior year of high school, and married at 21, still in college. That was nearly 34 years ago.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend early marriage for everyone, but what I do wish is that those who are reasonably mature not be so quickly discouraged from it. I have read of many such cases, now that the internet is facilitating it, of high school couples finally marrying like this, decades later.
There is a lot about this on the internet, people talking about their experiences, etc.,GIYF.
I think high school kids should be encouraged to consider the possibility, and should take their relationships seriously. It’s not for everyone, but a spouse from high school, like a lifetime friend from high school, will have something that you will never find in someone you met at a bar in your 30s. It gets very hard after high school to meet a potential made
It used to be you could met people in college without being charged with rape and you could ask out people at work without having HR call you in for a talk or being put on a #metoo list. Church used to be a place to meet people, pre-screened by people who knew you both.
Dating apps are for one-night stands or lunch dates with people who have a long list of “deal killers.”
I went to junior and senior high at the tail end of the era when one of the goals of secondary school was to assist young people in the transition to adulthood and in forming (binary heterosexual) relationships. There would be events and dances, arranged so that nobody was left out, and teachers would encourage everyone to participate.
I think sex ed should include information about marriage and possible early marriage, pros and cons, and in addition to how not to get pregnant, information on how to get pregnant, i.e., get married early, in your 20s, before your fertility takes a dive after 30, especially for women.
If you self-identify as a man, you should marry a third-world bride and be happy. Haven’t you heard that all those women are a cross of house-maids and sex-slaves? They will be happy to fill in both roles for a cost of their green card, and they will not sue you as long as you don’t let them learn English.
If you self-identify as a woman, your life is more difficult: it takes time and skill to spot that moneyed 😉 knight in the shining armor who is willing to become your protector and provider. But I guess #MeToo movement should help: just make sure that you get pregnant (if you can) and them appeal to authority (id you must).
If you think this is obscene, my Asian wife is laughing at you. 🙂 And so are all my sex doll brides in a Canadian doll brothel.
I don’t know.. let’s face it, even in the “best pairings”, where the man and woman are a good match, marriage will always a toss of the dice.
Romanticism – the idea that you are supposed love the one you marry is something that is rather recent from the the mid-18th century.
You should watch Alain de Botton’s videos:
Also his episode on Schopenhauer and Love, from his Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness series:
Mamma mia! Men and women are different!
What other strange reactionary ideas have you and your friend Shopenhauer got?
We got married at 22, I was a year out of college, she had another year. We met each other at 17 years of age, the Spring of my Senior year and her Junior year. We chose to date others in college, but I proposed in the Spring of my Junior year in college, and we had a 2 year engagement. We have been married 31 years and have a 22 year old, a 21 year old and an 18 year old. Two have graduated with their bachelor’s degrees, and the last is a freshman at the 2nd highest ranked public University in Texas. It took us dating others to decide we wanted to spend a lifetime together. It also took a lot of commitment to each other, to make sacrifices, and to our children. Education was a priority from pre-K all the way to their University. We took time to talk, to Love, and we had the help of our parents to have date nights to babysit when our kids were little. We were intentional about keeping each other in the other person’s life, even when “daddy had to work late”. We do a LOT of stuff together. She is my best friend and I am hers.
Why do people keep trying to figure out a one-size fits all situation?
Marriage itself doesn’t suit everyone. And for those is does suit, it still depends. Some people are happy to tag along to the first person they click with and are comfortable in staying together forever. Others need to explore and experiment before settling down. Others settle for a few years and need a change after, repeating the cycle over and over again.
While a lot of people here are reporting happy outcomes to early marriage, there is no shortage of the opposite. So – ideally one should stop bringing religion into it, making laws that don’t privilege one type of marriage vs the other, try and protect children as much as possible, and fore heavens sake, just let people decide for themselves what they want.
In a society that promotes freedom (individual freedom) above all, the American obsession with marriage is really out of character when freedom is concerned.
Funny you bring that up. I say let the religious types “define” marriage as a man and a woman in a church. But, then it is no longer defined in LAW. All marriage licenses are “Civil Commitment Documents” instead of a marriage license. This legal document replaces a marriage license and allows joint accounts and sharing of benefits. The state doesn’t care if you are married or not! Only if you are liable for the debts of your partner(s). When people fight in a divorce, what do they fight about? Custody of children, dividing up property, and who pays the debts. Custody will never change. The Civil Commitment should also specify property division in the event it is dissolved. And maybe an expiration, which requires renewal. The prenup would legally be required to be built in. No surprises.
Glen: I think Germany is pretty close to what you’re proposing, though they still call it “marriage”. The marriage certificate has a box to check for separate or joint property, for example, and checking that box is legally binding. They don’t have epic custody fights there due to (a) an explicit default to “mom wins” (same statistical outcomes as in the U.S. winner-take-all states, but without legal fees), (b) caps on legal fees for custody litigation, and (c) a cap on child support profits at roughly $5,000 per child per year (owning a child cannot be more lucrative than going to college and working). They don’t have alimony fights because there is essentially no alimony. See http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International
Mom always wins would have been a disaster for my wife. Her mom was the alcoholic and unstable and she was raised by her dad. I think custody should be awarded to the “most stable parent”. Again, not getting around custody issues. And I think child support should go into a trust, and the parent paying the child support pays the bills as directly as possible. It should not go directly to the guardian as it does now. That would solve mommy using child support to support her “lifestyle”.
Or the trust pays it’s share automatically. If the living situation changes, the guardian contacts the trustee.
Glen: “Mom always wins” in these European countries with limited child support profits does not mean “Mom always takes care of the children.” When children are not profitable, parents often negotiate something different than what a judge would impose if parents cannot agree. The idea that one parent has to be declared the winner (implicit in your language that “custody should be awarded…”) in a typical divorce is not a universal one. See the interview with the Linda Nielsen in http://www.realworlddivorce.com/CitizensLegislators for why this does not have any foundation in research psychology. See also the states, such as Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, that have decided this isn’t a productive use of citizens’ resources.
(Note that if a parent is truly unfit, e.g., alcoholic and neglectful, we have existing mechanisms to protect children that don’t depend on the parent being involved in custody litigation. A child can be taken by the government at any time. The European countries with “mom always wins” rules also provide for exceptions in the case of alcoholism or something else obvious and serious.)
Finally, I don’t think that you’re budgeting for the cost in dollars and harm to children of litigation over who gets to win the prize of “most stable parent”. In a winner-take-all system, parents will tend to use financial, emotional, and time resources on avoiding being the loser. These resources would have been available to their children if the government had not invited them to participate in a winner-take-all fight.