Re: When to get married?
Hoo. You knew I had to get into this one.
There is a lot to be said for Peter’s well penned takedown of this WaPo op-ed encouraging early marriage. In fact, I tend to agree with it by and large. I think people should get married whenever the hell they want. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks and all that.
However, I do feel that Peter short-changes Mr Regnerus’ op-ed in a couple of significant ways.
As commenters to his original post have pointed out, the fertility argument for early marriage does have some weight, since the later women get pregnant, the higher health risks they, and especially the children, face. Also, I believe there is some statistical (and definitely a lot of anecdotal) evidence that, generally, the older you are the less well you raise small kids. Your fifties are probably not the best time to deal with one or several teenagers’ idiosyncrasies…
I also think that the economic argument is not as irrelevant as Peter makes it out to be. Yes, you’re not going to get married at 22 because yay, we will save more, contribute more to economic growth and reducing the world’s carbon footprint. But conversely, if you’re an op-ed writer and you think getting married early would make society and the economy more healthy (and I think there’s a lot of weight behind that opinion), it doesn’t hurt to commit a few words to paper to raise awareness of that.
More importantly, I think Peter glosses over what is (to me) probably the most important point the op-ed makes: that of peer pressure.
As a 22 year old who will get married this year (inch’Allah), I’ve experienced it. It’s real, and it’s notable. There is a very strong “ideology” (for want of a better term) that tells us each and every one of us must enjoy ourselves, start our careers and — for the love of all that is holy! — go through many, many, preferably long steps, including but not limited to, dating, assessing “sexual compatibility” (whatever that means), going “exclusive,” meeting the parents, moving in together, having a pet, having a kid or two, et caetera ad nauseam ad infinitum before we even think about getting married.
I never stop being amazed at the paradox that the more marriage is cheapened, contractualized, made commitment-lite, covenant-lite (sorry, the financial and biblical pun is irresistible), the more we are told to be careful and risk-averse when it comes to entering into it. After all, do you really need seven years of shared rent, a golden retriever, a boy and a girl to know whether your mid-life crisis divorce will succeed? It’s Sex and the City as life ethic.
Please don’t look for someone whose life outlook and deepest sensibilities complete yours — how quaint! But make sure to find out on the first date whether he likes 80s pop non-ironically or grunts weirdly during sex, so you can quickly move on to the next guy. And for the love of God never stop bar-hopping, never stop reducing courtship to a mating dance and a checklist of the most shallow criteria, and please, please extend your adolescence for as long as damn possible.
Hang on, please let me catch my breath.
I don’t have a problem with people getting married after 25. Do whatever the hell you like. But I am annoyed by the seemingly endless array of people who think you have a problem if you even consider marriage before 25. And that really is, more (or less) subtly, what we are told.
My basic take on when to get married is this: life is short. I will be dead tomorrow. No one can ever be sure whether someone will always be “the right person” for you. But it’s actually pretty easy to make as damn sure as you can ever be. And once that day comes, there’s no room left for hesitation.
To me, that’s when you get married, whether you’re 21 or 71.
I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’ take on love and marriage, via Screwtape.
— Seth · Apr 27, 08:37 AM · #
“assessing “sexual compatibility” (whatever that means)”
I’ve been voluntarily celibate for nearly two decades. I’m certain whoever I might have fulfilled the prescribed social script with and married if I hadn’t had the freedom to experiment and discover I was asexual when I was in my late teens/early twenties would be extremely grateful if they had a clue. I know I am.
Your failure of imagination doesn’t mean something doesn’t exist.
— MouseJunior · Apr 27, 09:44 AM · #
Mouse: What? I don’t understand how your experience has anything at all to do with PEG’s argument.
Anyway, I too got married at 22, and I identify with most of the sentiments that PEG expresses here. It was undoubtedly the right thing to do, and I have no regrets about any of it. Nonetheless, when talking with certain people I felt a kind of shame at admitting I was married, especially given that our relationship before marriage had lasted less than a year. Now, five years later and with my one-year-old crawling around beside me, I think I’ve got the last laugh.
— JS Bangs · Apr 27, 11:13 AM · #
Mouse: I’m not sure what your point is, exactly.
JS: Congratulations!
— PEG · Apr 27, 12:09 PM · #
Like JS Bangs, I’m an early-ish marrier (I was 24, I guess, and my wife a few years older), and I sympathize entirely with this experience. It was a bit different among Catholic and otherwise Christian grad. school friends, but childhood friends, friends from Berkeley (especially), and family (in a somewhat different way) all thought we were doing something quite weird and even dangerous by going ahead and getting hitched and then immediately pregnant; part of this had to do with our getting engaged pretty quickly, but among a significant subset of those critics really did think that by not shacking up for at least a couple of years we were putting ourselves in serious jeopardy.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 27, 12:11 PM · #
I got married when I was very young. Very young. Wow, that was a huge mistake – although I do have a wonderful daughter, and we’re close and I love her just so much. So I can’t help but have mixed feelings about that.
Then, I waited 30 years – 30 years! – until I got married a second time.
I thought I was finally old enough to make a good decision – and I was deliriously in love someone.
I am still married, but – the person I married is not the person I was dating and in love with.
Yes, I know, that’s too simple a description, and it’s only my side of the story.
But, still, in my case, “shacking-up” before getting married could likely have saved me a lot of grief – a LOT of unhappiness – in both instances. In fact I’m absolutely convinced it would have prevented me from getting married the second time.
So – a poor decision when I was young and foolish, but then another poor decision when I am older and wiser!
Shacking up first? Hell yes!
— cr · Apr 27, 01:05 PM · #
PEG: I think you’re right that we should minimize peer pressure against early 20s marriage; my problem is that Regnerus seems to make a stronger claim — that we should actively favor early 20s marriage. Certainly he is in favor of it, and he seems to want us to be as well. And I don’t think he backs up that claims very well. The only real reason to marry young that he provides is fertility. But if you’ve found the person you want to commit to before 25, and you want to have kids with that person, then you’re going to marry and have kids. Declining fertility shouldn’t be a reason to get married to someone you aren’t already interested in marrying. And if you have found the person by, say, 22 or 23, then you’re almost certainly already going to be having the conversation about children, and facts about age-related fertility declines are hopefully going to come up.
If this is his only point, then the piece really boils down to, “If you’re serious about kids, plan to have them young, because it’s tougher as you get older” — which just isn’t the same as arguing in favor of early marriage, as the author seems to want to do.
As a side note, I’d also point out that in many communities, particularly rural and religious communities, early 20s marriage is still common, and social pressure actually pushes people to be engaged within a year of graduation from college.
— Peter Suderman · Apr 27, 01:38 PM · #
Peter:
Well, ok.
I mean, I don’t want to defend Regnerus, and I agree that his op-ed was a bit wobbly. But I certainly share the spirit in which he attacks what I see as a prevailing mentality according to which the later you get married, the better.
I guess it all depends what you mean by “actively favor” early marriage. I guess I “generally favor” early marriage in the sense that I think wobbling and waffling on commitment to someone you love and see yourself spending the rest of your life with is, well, juvenile. I probably wouldn’t put it that way because I don’t feel comfortable telling other people how to live or making grand prescriptions of this type. And maybe that’s hypocritical (but then again, hypocrisy is a time-tested social lubricant). And I certainly wouldn’t favor, say, tax breaks for people who get married under 25.
I guess the reason I wrote the post is because I felt that, despite its flaws, the broad thrust of the piece — there is a general mindset against early marriage out there, and it doesn’t make much sense — is roughly right, and so that it deserved more than an attack on the few economic/etc claims it makes.
Sure, but I think we can agree that it’s not the direction in which the broad society is moving. And I’m against that kind of peer pressure too, but two wrongs don’t make a right.
— PEG · Apr 27, 02:10 PM · #
And once that day comes, there’s no room left for hesitation.
Funny, that. I’ve been dating the same girl — since highschool — monogamously for ten years (I’m 27). We’ve never broken up, not once. We’ve lived together for 6 years now, and have the healthiest relationship of anybody I know. I have no doubt that she’s the one, and yet, I feel no urgency to get married.
I also find it fascinating that both our parents just can’t bring themselves to let us sleep together when we come into town for a visit. Not married, dontcha know? Ten years and careers be damned. They also feel stings of embarrassment when explaining to friends and family our living arrangement. It’s clear they consider marriage an initiation rite into adulthood, rather than a joining of two people in love and commitment. Until that initiation rite is performed, I’m a child, dating a girl, and children are a no-no.
To me, that’s just hilarious, and probably accounts for our putting off marriage for as long as we have. Not that I don’t see the benefits in marriage. I do, I really do. Others obviously need to have their love annealed in the crucible of the marriage rite, need a bright-line disruption between their past and future selves. It’s just that I don’t, and never did, but still will, to soothe the feelings of other people. At least we’ll get a great party and a sweet vacation out of it.
— Sargent · Apr 27, 02:25 PM · #
Amen, PEG.
Sargent,
you sound like a child to me too.
— Adam Greenwood · Apr 27, 02:28 PM · #
Adam, watch out boy, I’ll flip you. Flip you for real.
Nah, in all seriousness: you got a daughter?
— Sargent · Apr 27, 02:50 PM · #
This seems as good a time as any to recommend Frederica Mathewes-Green’s wonderfully thought-provoking essay, “Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy.” http://www.frederica.com/writings/lets-have-more-teen-pregnancy.html
For me, it’s a brute fact of nature that humans are biologically ready to reproduce in their mid-teens. In fact, their reproductive capabilities will never be better than then. And if you read Robert Epstein’s “The Case Against Adolescence,” there’s an immense amount of historical evidence that people in their late teens are perfectly capable of being mature and responsible individuals — assuming, that is, that they live in a society that expects teens to grow up. If our society has this weird prolongation of immaturity — one that postpones emotional adulthood until potentially decades after biological adulthood — then it’s our social expectations that should be rethought.
— Stuart Buck · Apr 27, 02:56 PM · #
Well, that Atlantic essay in favor of “settling” (link) made a tolerably strong case otherwise, though the intended audience certainly wasn’t women in their early 20s.
Also, this:
… is, well, spot on.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 27, 03:17 PM · #
I think wobbling and waffling on commitment to someone you love and see yourself spending the rest of your life with is, well, juvenile.
Come on, Superego. That’s just ridiculous. It might be a popular trope that “putting off marriage” equals “wobbling and waffling on commitment,” but that’s all it is. A trope, a socialized stereotype played for effect in sitcoms and movies.
I’m happy for marriers, but really guys, why the disrespect? Commitment and marriage are not interchangeable terms; committing without marriage is not juvenile or deviant or wrong. It’s just a choice, sometimes a very adult choice, albeit one that’s less socially acceptable than the alternative. Who cares?
— Sargent · Apr 27, 03:49 PM · #
Since I generally support PEG’s position, I guess I’ll comment here rather than on Peter’s post.
My wife and I married at 29 and 31 respectively. We had our first child when I was 33, and our second when I was 39. Before meeting my wife I dated three other women whom I could have imagined myself married to: Laurie, my high school sweet heart; Sandra, a Dutch MBA student at the U of O I met on a rafting trip; and Laura, one of two pretty blonde girls who were at the take out of a kayaking trip, I did a mental coin flip and asked her instead of the other girl.
The reasons I did not marry any of these three women are manifold, including differing career paths with differing geographic requirements, differing sexual needs and expectations, luck, whimsy, and a host of other things big and small. Unless the decision is made in that first early rush of new love, are always reasons not to get married, and my experience is that new levels of intimacy also reveal new facets of incompatibility.
Although I did not recognized it at the time the benefit of hindsight, I recognized that social pressure against early marriage, felt by one or both of us, was a non-trivial factor in my not marrying Laurie, Sandra, or Laura. Again, with the benefit of hindsight I believe that if I had married any one of these women that I would not have been more or less happily married; I believe I would have been differently happily and unhappily married.
Now a detour.
My films are self-distributed. No one ever said to me “Wow, these films are amazing, and we’d like to distribute them,” or at least no one ever said that until after we had already started doing it ourselves.
I’ve never been hired for a “real” job.
I didn’t get into a competitive graduate program, or go to a selective college.
In fact, as best as I can remember the only time I’ve ever been “tapped” was in the fourth grade when I was selected for a seventies-style experimental classroom sort of like the one that Bart Simpson got lost in when he switched tests with Millhouse. That didn’t work out well for Bart, and it didn’t work out well for me either.
From that perspective what I have noticed is that generally speaking people are more enthusiastic about undertakings that involve some sort of selection process; if you can simply decide to do this or that, other people will generally not be as impressed with this or that as they are with something you had to convince some sort of selection process to allow you to do.
For example, you will get a lot more approbation if you tell people that Tartan is distributing your films than if you tell people they are self-distributed; people will be more impressed if you blog at TheAtlantic.com than at TheAmericanScene.com; people will be more inclined to crack the spine of a novel publish by Random House than one that is self-published. And I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing either.
But what I remember from being in my teens and twenties is that I looked at marriage and having children though a similar lens. As a young man, marriage and having children looked like something that “anybody” could do, and because they were something that “anybody” could do, they also seemed like they were something that people who couldn’t do anything else would choose, like self-publishing a book because no “real” publisher is interested. I was head over heels in love with Laurie, and to this day I recall my mother saying to me “You two are so good to each other.” But it never would have occurred to me to ask her to marry me, because that would have seemed an expression of both very low and very mixed up priorities. And even if I had asked her, she never would have said “yes” for the very the same reasons.
—-
A few months after the birth of our first child, after we had settled into being new parents, I was on the couch with my wife, cradling my daughter in my arms and I looked up at Peggy and said, “If I had known how much I was going to like this, I would have knocked up my high school girlfriend.” I know, that sounds glib, but I meant it and mean it with absolute sincerity. There’s no speculating on how my life might have been different, my life took so many twists and turns between 18 and 33 it’s impossible to imagine how that would have been changed if I had been a father and a husband, and I’m quite happy with how things turned out. But in my gut, I know that my life would not have been poorer. Undoubtably it would have been different, but I’m quite sure it would not have been poorer.
—-
I don’t envy Pascal. I can fairly well hear the tone of voice and see the looks on the faces of people who think he and his bride-to-be are making a mistake, selling themselves short, doing what’s easy instead of what the are capable of. On another thread there was some discussion of how/if students can be taught to act in their own self-interest without being threatened with a penalty if they do not. No less valuable a skill, I think, is learning to act in one’s own self-interest, even if there is a penalty for doing so.
—-
And also I see Sargent has added his thoughts, which I’ll respond to with the prenuptial advice I gave Andrew Sullivan
You’re nervous? Of course you are. You’re submitting your autonomy to the State in exchange for legal recognition of and protection of your relationship. You’re entering a contract to regard your beloved as family, a contract that (some day in your future) will supersede love and affection. You don’t really know what marriage is about until the day you have a fight that so bad the only reason you stay together is because you’re married.
The storm will pass. You’ll both still be there, still married, and glad you are, and you’ll say “Oh, that’s what the big deal about this piece of paper is all about.”
I agree with you, Sargent, that you’re parent are making an unhelpful distinction; but you know how that goes, my house my rules. But I also think you haven’t fully apprehended what marriage is, and that you maybe (hopefully pleasantly!) surprised by how your world has changed after the party and vacation.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 27, 04:01 PM · #
To me, this sounds like you are not getting married because your parents want you to get married. I think that’s what Adam meant when he called you “a child.” It’s like a kid who won’t eat food he likes, just because it’s what his folks made for dinner.
— Blar · Apr 27, 04:04 PM · #
Nice comment, Tony, that’s the kind of thing I go back and read again later and see new stuff in. I appreciated it.
— Sanjay · Apr 27, 04:25 PM · #
Throughout human history and across the great majority of cultures, the prime age for childbearing was the late teens and the early twenties. The nearly universal family unit was a man and a woman, united through some kind of commitment ceremony, and their offspring. (Polygamy ran a distant second to that model, and family units based on homosexual couples were nearly nonexistent.) We, of course, are much wiser and better than all preceding generations. We know that human nature is infinitely malleable and that societies based on all conceivable varieties of families are equally successful. We know that delaying commitment to a spouse and offspring as long as possible is a sign of maturity, that the number of children should be limited to as few as possible (and preferably none), and that adolescence is best if prolonged well into the thirties (and, with good plastic surgery, into the forties). All praise unto us.
— Gary Imhoff · Apr 27, 04:36 PM · #
Sargent: Apparently TAS ate my earlier comment but I wanted to praise your earlier comment, as well as cr’s. As you can tell from my modulating, my “generally“s, my “well“s, etc. I’m uncomfortable making broad pronouncements about a subject such as marriage.
Obviously people will have different stories and there will always be exceptions to what anyone says. Yes, of course, some people who are just shacked up are just as, even more, committed to each other than many married couples. But there’s also a reason why marriage is a socially significant institution and I believe you can also see general trends and formulate judgements about them, no matter how modulated and equivocal they may be.
John: Thanks.
— PEG · Apr 27, 04:37 PM · #
I’ve been married for fifteen years and have never had a fight that made me glad of a piece of paper.
As has been pointed out, much of this is cultural. It might not make sense for some places to encourage “immaturity” (regardless of its relationship to creativity)or that individuals finish a thorough course of study to prepare themselves for their own preferences or modern job markets. Urban centers are not such places. From my own perspective, Sargents position seems the traditional conservative one.
— Cascadian · Apr 27, 06:34 PM · #
Blar: I think that’s what Adam meant when he called you “a child.”
Or it could be that I don’t want to make a life-altering decision for the wrong reasons. It could be that, since I’m in my mid-twenties and just graduated from law school, and my girlfriend is in her mid-twenties, has an MBA, owns her own company, and agrees with me on the marriage thing, and since we both know neither of us is going anywhere — that because of all of this, time is on my side.
Or Adam could be suffering from a cleft asshole. Either way, I should probably wait for more information before jumping to conclusions.
Tony: I definitely know about the my house my rules thing. On the point about children, it’s funny: my girlfriend is the one who wants to wait, who half-jokingly talks about going the surrogate mother route. Not me, no sir. I can’t wait to have little Sargents running around.
PEG: Thanks. As I said above, I definitely see the social utility in marriage. But on the margins, where couples stay together forever and trees are made of lollipops, a commitment can be made without marriage. Not that I’ll get to find out; the “wife” says we’re getting married in a few years, which means, we’re getting married in a few years.
— Sargent · Apr 27, 07:35 PM · #
maybe I’m off topic and worse, totally impertinent, but be that as it may I have noticed something on my facebook friend list. I do the friend thing with old friends – those I havent seen in ages, either high school, college, etc. I’m 38 so my boyhood, hometown & ole fraternity brothers are about my age. Without coordinating our efforts or working on peer pressure – because we’ve been out of touch and are geographically distant from one another – without all these factors, we (those who have married) have all followed the same pattern of marrying in our early/mid-30’s and have had our first child at about 35 or 36.
I’ve been finding this quite odd, maybe it says something about my generation.
— JB · Apr 27, 10:53 PM · #
Re: We’ve lived together for 6 years now, and have the healthiest relationship of anybody I know. I have no doubt that she’s the one, and yet, I feel no urgency to get married.
As a practical matter, you are married. You just don’t have a notorized piece of paper that says so.
Re: For me, it’s a brute fact of nature that humans are biologically ready to reproduce in their mid-teens.
Nevertheless, throughout most of history people did not marry in their teens, but waited until they were in their 20s, sometimes even their late 20s. The exceptions mainly involved the daughters of the upper class (who were useless for anything but marriage, unlike working or even middle class daughters) and certain eras when prosperity became general enough that men could support a family at a much younger age than usual. Still, both Plato and Aristotle counselled waiting until one’s 20s before marrying, and the Church also recommended long betrothals in the Middle Ages. Our historical memory is warped by the fact that we went through one of those odd periods of general prosperity in the 50s and 60s. Our great-great grandparents couldn’t rush into things as fast as our parents and, maybe, granparents did.
— JonF · Apr 28, 02:04 AM · #
I hate to state the obvious, and apologize if it was already stated, I’ve lost patience with reading through all the various comments. But marrying younger than 25 or older than 25 and having it work out or not, has less to do with the age and more to do with the maturity level in understanding what marriage really is.
Ultimately marriage is about sacrifice. Not the martyrdom sacrifice or find a virgin sacrifice, but the realization that your love (even if at times you don’t like them) expects, nay, requires that you be willing to sacrifice everything for that person. There are 20 year olds who understand this well, and there are 50 year olds who don’t and may never understand.
It is only more noticeable in today’s society because the maturity of adulthood is no longer present to the majority of people in the late teenage years. Perhaps it was at 16, perhaps it was at 19, but back in the day, most teenagers gained a sense of adult responsibility in these latter years of the teens. Modern culture has delayed this sense of responsibility, pushing it back to the mid or even late 20’s. The college years, the experimentation, the desire to get the education and get the good well-paying job, before taking on any real adult responsibilities such as a wife/husband and family, all of these ideas perpetrated by, (the original, original author is right), the generation growing up in the 50’s and 60’s.
The problem with the Op-Ed is that they assume that simply encouraging young people to get married at a younger age will “fix” whatever he sees wrong with society. In actuality, if people in their late teens and early twenties would simply start taking on some responsibilities more than college loans and making sure they have enough money in their bank account for beer that night, then maybe they will discover that marrying younger does have it’s advantages. Such as having children at a younger age and consequently having them all out of the house by the time you’re 40, 45-tops.
— Eliana · Apr 28, 02:51 AM · #
My own experience allows me to straddle this issue somewhat. My wife and I had our first child accidentally after dating for a year or so, turbulently, when I was 25 (she a year older). We broke up, she moved to a different but not too distant city, we got back together on about the child’s first birthday, but remained living about an hour apart. I started law school and we spent weekends and summers together. After law school, we lived together in a fairly isolated rural area where she had grown up, for two years. Those two years were a trial in all of the related senses of the word, and at the end of it, preparing to move to a new city (now with a baby and the five-year old) with something of a plan for our lives, we got hitched. I was 31. Now we are almost 33 and 34, with a third child, and our marriage is like a second skin – not such an apt description but I balk at using value-laden adjectives for it.
In my case, parenthood was the earlier commitment than marriage by six years. But marriage was no afterthought, but a it was a serious, happy, subtly ceremonial occasion, even without a party or extended trip. There was that feeling of having bound ourselves together, voluntarily and gladly. The weather was fine, we went before a judge, took pictures under the cherry blossoms, and spent the night at a waterpark hotel with the kids. I relate this to show that this wasn’t the typical experience, but it was that mix of the official and the personal – that certain mix that, in the wide world, seems to attract so much authoritarian effort to prescribe it.
In relationships, the question of whether to stay together always hovers, in good and bad times. Marriage, at a minimum, shifts the presumption, and merges a profound internal decision with the official record. This is, perhaps, a deliberate understatement – but even if that is all it is, what a thing! And what a thing to dissuade a young man or woman from, who wants to enter into it. So unsurprising, though, that marriage is a vessel for so many fears.
Now, I hear from my friends (so often over facebook, as a few people have observed) who are starting to have children at 32-35. I rejoice with them, but slyly, for they have a long way to travel, and a more awkward, less brave time of life to travel it in. And at the early end, the difference between early and late 20s is very significant – I think it’s a few self-assured lucky ones who find their mate at the early end, and recognize it, at that age, but having done so, they should get on with it. This is controversial?
But in my 20s, I never would have done any of it voluntarily. From the time my future wife was pregnant, when it came to all of the decisions along the way, social convention was useless. I found myself thinking – hard – about real and consequential things, and acting on those thoughts without the usual measure of happy talk or outside affirmation, after having spent quite a bit of life in abstractions and diversions and keeping any kind of consequences at bay. And I may have never been so conscious about cleansing myself of social expectations, so that I could make the best decisions (which is not to say they were all right).
Accordingly, I agree with the part of Mr. Regnerus op-ed that takes on social convention about marriage. Such conventions, whatever they be, are so famously, eternally devoid of utility in the specific (although they may serve certain public goals), that any challenge to them is automatically worthy and useful in my opinion. So although Regnerus’ op-ed was aptly described by a commenter as “wobbly”, he won me over with this:
Indeed, many things do come easier earlier in life. And if they don’t, what of it?
— anselm · Apr 28, 02:54 AM · #
The earlier you get married, the more likely you are to enjoy the chief consolations of old age: grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 28, 02:58 AM · #
Yeah, especially with no retirement. ;)
— PEG · Apr 28, 08:29 AM · #
If you want people to marry younger, like they used to do, you need to revert us to an agrarian economy. If you want to have computers, modern medicine, etc., people will need to delay marriage. The time commitments in the early 20’s are just too intense to allow having a real family for many professional careers.
Steve
— steve · Apr 28, 02:24 PM · #
On the occasion this week of my father’s 83rd birthday and my mother’s rapidly failing health, I have been thinking about this post and wondering about the fact that if I had had my children earlier they would have had more years to know and love their grandparents. Not a reason to get married and have kids early perhaps, but not something I gave a moments thought to as a twentysomething year old.
— ell · Apr 29, 06:04 AM · #
What does peer pressure have to do with what you choose to do? I never really understood how that worked. Maybe my peers weren’t particularly vicious or something. I suppose one reason for delaying marriage is to get over one’s susceptibility to peer pressure, real or imagined.
Also, younger isn’t always better. Remember, traditional marriage often marries girls off at 10 or 12 and marriage is expected to start as a sexual relationship, with love something that might be learned later. Child bearing is relatively dangerous until a woman approaches 20, especially when she is probably malnourished. Wasn’t the old rule on calcium balance, one child costs one tooth? Please, don’t idealize traditional marriage, even traditional monogamous marriage. It is rather nauseating.
— Kaleberg · Apr 29, 06:08 PM · #