I married my first wife when she was 18 and I was 20. We went through a lot of hardship. It should not have worked out: we were both poor, from broken homes, in an LDR from different worlds. She was the popular girl, I was a shy and awkward nerd. When we got married, we had only been in one another’s presence for a few weeks total. I went into the marriage not expecting a path or plan, as my parents were toxic which ended with my mother’s suicide, and my mother in law had been married 4 times before she became single for the last time. None of us had healthy marriages to draw from. At our wedding, her relatives even said, “I give it two years, tops.” We were desperately poor, and struggled most of our marriage with health and money issues.
But we made it work for 25 years. We’d still be married, but she passed away ten years ago. We became “foxhole buddies,” us against the world.
This, all marriages are supposed to be this, us vs the world, while I get the argument you don’t know who you really want when you are 20, I’ve also seen cases like yours, as long as both people figure out us vs the world, I think the marriage will last. So when people say 25 and after it makes sense, I’ve also seen cases where people never understand in their life this us vs them mentality, and are never happy and I always wonder the question how much age plays a role in people understand what marriage is supposed to be?
Anyway thanks for your take my man, my condolences, I wish you all the best.
I have neither insight nor retorts to offer, I just wanted to congratulate you on 25 years. Hell, even 5 years with someone who’d dig in with you is worthy of praise in this world. I’m glad you found your foxhole buddy, and I wish you all the best.
I swear some people go out of their way to judge others for the most ridiculous things. Maybe try asking yourself why you are not happy about people finding love without going through half a dozen shitty relationships.
For real. This post has big “I have regrets and/or fears that I missed out on my younger life, and the only way to not be afraid is to invalidate other people’s choices” energy. Every life and every combination of experiences produces a unique piece of art. OP, your life is valid and worthwhile - you don’t have to tear other people down for that to be the case.
Oh I have issues with commitment and a constant feeling of ‘Is this the best I can expect?’ but I don’t regret my younger life.
My ‘weird’ sentiment stems more from me looking in from the outside at relationships where 20 year olds decide they want to spend the rest of their lives with each other. I can’t imagine missing out on potentially meeting someone more compatible. Can you really meet the most compatible person for you when you’re 20?
When I was 20 I was a very different person, I’m assuming that’s similar for others.
Other commenters have talked about how they grow with partners but I wonder if it’s truly possible to do that while being so ‘together’ with another person. Some things you have to learn on your own.
Just because you matured late doesn’t mean everyone else does, a lot of ppl are exceptionally emotionally mature by the age of 16 or 17 as well, you should always take a decision based on your maturity level and someone elderlys opinion who also knows you well, like your parents, they probably have a good idea
I honestly don’t know who you’re talking about. I don’t find most adults to even be mature people, especially in relationships. The main thing keeping adult relationships alive is just that they spend most of their time apart from their partner at work.
This is anecdotal but everyone I’ve ever met that made a high school relationship work didn’t make it work through “maturity”. They were just committed. Often, they were extremely immature and naive and were bonded by the hardships of their 20s.
Go ahead and ask people who were together when they were younger and made it work. I’ve never heard any of them say they were mature and knew what they were doing.
Fair point, I think it is just that you should be mature enough to work with you partner together, or atleast one person should be at that time, and if they really love each other, then good
The way I think about it is that the core idea is that you will stick together with your partner through everything and grow together. Most high schoolers don’t go in with that idea, they just have strong enough emotional connections that they stumble into that.
The maturity part of being an adult is knowing that’s what you should do and knowing how to do it without hurting the other person in the process.
It’s like dancing. If someone really wants to dance with you, they’ll be patient as you find your rhythm and you both learn to dance. Feet get stepped on but it’s the same dance. Getting older doesn’t teach you to dance. Being young doesn’t mean you aren’t light on your feet. Maturity in relationships is knowing most of the wrong moves and never dropping your partner.
You can be happy and find love without marrying someone.
Like i think most people would say its weird to marry someone the day after you meet them for the first time, right? Is that you hating peoples happiness and love? or is that you being a realest that that marriage probably wont last and will just be messy for both people?
Probably 75% of marriages like that don’t go well. OP is right.
That doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing though. Divorce doesn’t have to be traumatic, and it should be more normalized.
Wow, really? Sure is an expensive and necessarily painful thing to opt into or to normalize. I’d rather it be normalized to not get married in the first place.
It’s not that expensive, I did it for $400 amicably. We had a fun time while married and I don’t regret it. Why not just make it easier for people to do what they want and not punish young people for making decisions.
And yet it’s costed others (every day) thousands to millions of dollars
Or just be a couple? Save yourselves and everyone else in the families the money and mental energy.
Oh brother
It goes up. Now I think people that get married before 40 are weird.
On serious note… It’s any age. You can tell when a couple is just trying to reproduce an image of “family” because they were told it’s the next thing to do in life. Working in retail id often see families you could tell just went through the motions and that everyone was disconnected from one another. It’s sad.
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.
Similarly, my wife and I married at ages 23 and 22, respectively, just over twenty years ago. Altogether, we’ll have been by each other’s side for 24 years this Friday (a date I consider more important than our elopement anniversary) and I can’t imagine anyone else by my side on this stupid, cruel journey around the sun.
That’s what I dream of every night
Imagine the following scenario: you meet someone in college, and when you graduate at 22 you don’t want to split up. They say sure, let’s live together, but we need to get engaged; if it doesn’t work out we can just break it off. After a year you realize your lives are much better together. You decide to get married but not to have kids until you’re 30. If it doesn’t work out you can divorce, but you sign a prenup and at least no kids would be involved.
If you both have clear and compatible career goals, that scenario saves you a lot of dating drama and gives you valuable support. I wouldn’t call someone in that scenario “weird.”
I think the main point here is people around those ages aren’t fully capable of making those kinds of decisions in the first place.
There’s a reason why most marriages end in divorce after all.
Get married before you have a clue. Get a clue after being married a couple years. Get a divorce because you realize you had no idea what you were doing.
Maturity plays a much more important role than age. Some people are never fit to marry, some have what it takes by the time they are 16/17. It’s not often that it plays out well for the youngest ones, and since each year brings new experiences and understandings each year moves along the bell curve of “marriage readiness”. So is it more likely that a 24 year old is more ready for marriage than a 18 year old. Yes. Is it guaranteed? No. I know some 50/60 year olds that still aren’t ready for marriage. They just never learned the skills it takes to have a healthy marriage. Giving an age as a hard cutoff is too arbitrary a measure. Age doesn’t guarantee shit.
That’s it, end of thread. Maturity plays such an important factor it’s astonishing it’s not the first thing being discussed instead of an arbitrary number.
24yo people don’t see themselves as children. This post is probably coming from a 40yo person.
The age at which you meet has nothing to do with it. Healthy relationships are about evolving together. If you can’t do that or if you do it separately, that’s when it falls apart. Sometimes you’re lucky and you find a compatible person early, sometimes you don’t. That’s all there is to it.
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.
Now that’s a healthy relationship. I agree marriage isn’t for some, just like having kids isn’t for some. To each their own, perhaps my views will change in the future.
I see a pretty stark difference between people who married young and had kids right away, vs people who married young and enjoyed their time for a while before having kids. The ones who had kids seem weird to me, never got a chance to goof off in their 20s and figure out who they are. The ones who waited feel more normal. But that’s just my experience.
The ones who had kids seem weird to me, never got a chance to goof off in their 20s and figure out who they are.
I definitely needed to goof off in my 20s and figure out who I was. But not everybody is like that, and the meme in question suggests it’s “weird” to know who you are and not need to goof off.
This is the main point here, IMO. A child is a huge responsibility and the early 20s is a period of life you’re still figuring things out. Culture also plays a role here; where I’m from, people are deciding to live together (without having kids) for a couple of years before formally marrying.
Do whatever you want. Maybe your marriage will last, maybe it won’t. Live your life. Take chances.
Hahahahahaha
Cries in paralysing anxiety
I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I have lived with a persistent background anxiety for my whole life, and only in the last year have I started treating it (in my 40’s). It hasn’t solved all my problems, but it does mean I’m not constantly jittery. If you’re already treating your anxiety, then I can only wish you luck and success.
24 is just as arbitrary an age as 18, change my mind
someone at 24 has several more years of experience in the adult world. someone at 24 has several more years of neurological development (which isn’t complete until around 25). in other words, at 24 someone has better context for decision-making and better decision-making ability than someone who is 18.
Yes it’s all about mental age and mindset.
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
Luck is something I didn’t consider.
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 got 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.
I doubt waiting makes people any luckier in that respect. In the end, it’s a gamble.
100% one of my employees married at 40 and got divorced at 45 life happens no matter the age. If you cannot work on yourself with your spouse and vis a vis you are fucked anyway at whatever age
Two reasons to wait:
- people in their early 20s are more likely to change dramatically later, so definitely more of a gamble at that age
- because it’s a gamble, you should already be well prepared for life on your own before doing it; that gives you a solid fallback in case things don’t work out
And on the flip side you might plan out your life to begin when you’re thirty, wait until youre wise and wealthy, then suddenly die.
If you live somewhere where life expectancy is close enough to 30 to make that eventuality part of your life choices, then go ahead and marry as a teenager. Don’t even wait for 20, marry at 16.
Likewise, if you live in a place where nobody dies before they reach their life expectancy, waiting might be a good idea.
Life expectancy is the age most people live to. Some live less, some live more. You shouldn’t make plans heavily counting on one of those exceptions. Don’t hurry up to do things just in case you’re one of the ones who live less, don’t delay things too long because you might live to 120.
Planning for living 30 years only makes sense in a place where most people don’t live over that.
I think overcomming obstacles growing as people together is an experience and bonding I would have never liked to miss. Going from a broke ass Teenager to now was a wild trip and my wife was there the whole time. She changed and I changed but we never changed apart because we communicated about our inner selves
But that’s where the gamble is. You changed together and it worked out. Others grow apart through no fault of their own and despite their desire to keep things working, they just don’t want the same things anymore. Your and my experience are the lucky ones.
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.
Well that’s just like your opinion man. But yeah.
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 :)
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.
