Top Reasons to Marry Young

[Kelsey]

I married young. I was 21, DH 20 (a month before his 21st). We knew we were going to get married so we figured, why wait? Also, funding for college.

1.Drifting Through One’s Twenties Can Waste a Key Decade

When people expect that they’ll marry at thirty (the average age for first marriages is now at around 27 for women), then they tend to see their twenties as their time to explore, not their time to settle down. Everything gets delayed. You can spend a few years experimenting with different careers (or lack thereof), or traveling with no purpose, or hopping from relationship to relationship. As I talked about last week, though, your twenties are an important decade financially. If you can start saving then, you really set yourself up well for life.

And the earlier people start saving and maturing, the better off and more productive society is.

We still did all that except hopping from relationship.

2. Having Babies Younger is Better for Society

Physically, the best years to have babies is in your early twenties. Yet few people are married or ready today at that point, largely because we have extended adolescence so far. While most people had babies young fifty years ago, today having one’s first baby after age 30 is the norm in many circles.

Yet while socially we’ve changed, physically we haven’t. And as fertility rates drop, perhaps it would be better for society to prioritize maturing younger rather than prolonging the years when you “find yourselfâ€, especially since those years really are so valuable.

Married young. 30 now. Still no babies.

3.Why Marrying Young Can Be Good For You. You “Grow Up†Together

When you marry at 20 or 21, you haven’t always figured out what you want in a house, or how you want to organize a kitchen, or how you want to pay your bills. You don’t know what you want in a church or where you want to live. But you can grow up and make those decisions together, and it’s kinda fun!

When Keith and I married at 21 we had no idea about how we wanted to spend vacations or what kind of house we wanted, let alone how we wanted to do housework. We just figured it out ourselves. And because we hadn’t had our own routines for so many of these things, it wasn’t hard to merge.

I agree in some cases.

4. It’s Easier to Merge Two Homes when There’s Not Much To Them

Imagine you’ve been doing your finances on Quicken on the computer for ten years, and then you marry someone who keeps all receipts in shoe boxes. That’s tough to find a new way of doing it, when you’re both so set in your ways.

Imagine you’ve had ten years since you moved out of your parents place to set your own traditions for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Now you have to do it all over again, when you’re emotionally wedded to the things you’ve already done.

It’s just tricky to merge two households. It’s easier to start off together.

I agree that it's easier than merging two households but that's not a reason to push a marriage that you're not ready for!

8. You Avoid a Lot of Heartache

If people married young, perhaps we’d have fewer “exes†and fewer regrets. So much of the problem in marriages is caused by past baggage. If we put the expectation on kids that “it’s fine to get married at 21″ rather than “you had better not get married until you finish your degree and you have a good jobâ€, then people would treat relationships at 20 more seriously. They wouldn’t think, “this can’t go anywhere, so let’s just have fun!†Often that “fun†ends up causing a lot of tears.

Still have them.

9. You Can Focus Your Goals Earlier

Once you’re married, you can start making real plans. Where do we want to be in 5 years? In 10 years? When do we want to buy a house? What education do we need? Where do we want to live? Certainly you can do those things when you’re single, but it’s often tricky since you don’t know where life is going to take you. Once you’re married, you can nail these things down. And if you do marry at 22, then you will start thinking about buying a house. If you don’t marry until 28, you’re often not worried about buying a home at all, and so you rent for years.

Researchers have found that marriage boosts one’s income and one’s net worth, all on its own, even controlling for class, race, and education. Being married makes people hunker down and treat life more seriously. And that’s good, because it means that ultimately you’ll be financially better off.

I don't think it made a difference for me, personally.

10. You Have Decades and Decades Together

I hope so.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I checked a related post on not wasting your 20s, and I suspect that she's referring to some advice from The Wealthy Barber, which was a hugely popular financial planning book in Canada.

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/ ... d-returns/

She gives an example which is almost identical to the link. If you play around with a calculator that can do exponents, and if you assume a rate of return of at least 10%, you can see the difference. Calculate 1.1 to the power of 40, and 1.1 to the power of 20. If you invest $1,000 at the age of 20 and it grows by 10% per year, compounded yearly, you will have over $45,000 at the age of 60. If you invest $1,000 at the age of 40 and it also grows at 10% compounded yearly, you'll have just over $6,000 at age 60.

So, the idea of starting to get serious about working and saving and buying a home earlier does make some financial sense. What's a bit more debatable is whether getting married young encourages people to become more serious about saving earlier.

The other big piece, though, is not derailing education and career plans, because that also makes a HUGE difference over a lifetime. A few years of education or training can make the difference between minimum wage or a well-paying career. I don't know if she emphasizes that enough.

[tralala]

As I talked about last week, though, your twenties are an important decade financially. If you can start saving then, you really set yourself up well for life.

And the earlier people start saving and maturing, the better off and more productive society is.

Which is exactly why marriage, buying a house, and babies are being delayed till people are in their thirties. These things are a huge financial strain, and given the fact that loads of 20 somethings are struggling to find well paying jobs and paying off their college debt, I wouldnt be surprised if mid thirties starts becoming the norm for most people.

[alba]

Yeah, I always feel this way about the "young energetic parent" thing. I didn't feel any less energetic at thirty than I did at twenty. I mean, my inclination to stay up until 2 AM dancing and drinking lemon drop shots had gone way downhill. But I needed about the same amount of sleep, I took about the same amount of physical activity... basically entering middle age does not automatically equal decrepitude.

Obviously there's some extremes to this and I'm sure the kid Charlie Chaplin had at 70 probably experienced a rather less active dad than he would have otherwise, but frankly the thing that makes me the tiredest is the sleep deprivation and constant driving that comes along with parenting:)

And, as with everything in life, there's a flipside, in that what you may gain in physical energy, you may also lose out on in emotional maturity. My aunt had her first kid at 25 (at a time when many women that age were on baby #3 or 4), and she didn't have another for seven years. She says she was really too young to be a parent at 25, and much more ready when her second one came along. I didn't know my aunt at that age, but I'm fairly certain she wasn't some kind of perpetually adolescent partier :lol:

[Peas n carrots]

The grandparent age thing doesn't always work out. My mom had me at 17, and she just turned 50 this year. I would be an older mom but she would be a young grandparent.

However, my grandma had my mom at nearly 40. When I was born she was nearly 60 and grandpa late 60's and they never were able to get on the floor and play with me.

I have a dear friend who is mid-30's with a toddler...her dad is in his late 70's and in excellent health. He gets down on the floor to play with the baby.

Go figure

[Full enough quiver]

Everyone in my family had kids young. My daughter got to know her great great great grandmother. She died when my daughter was 5. Great great grandma is still alive. That part has been awesome.

The downside is that my mom was in her 30s when she became a grandma. All her kids but one were under 18. She didn't really get to enjoy being a grandma.

[Oz1977]

Woweeee! My great great greats all died like, 75 years before I was born!

[Mama Mia]

Everyone in my family had kids young. My daughter got to know her great great great grandmother. She died when my daughter was 5. Great great grandma is still alive. That part has been awesome.

The downside is that my mom was in her 30s when she became a grandma. All her kids but one were under 18. She didn't really get to enjoy being a grandma.

I think the really young grandparent thing makes more of a difference if someone only has a few kids. My parents were in their thirties when they became grandparents, but their children were late teens, so they got to have fun being grandparents at the time. What was interesting for them is that many of their friends had young children at the same time they had young grandchildren and so had very different perspectives. I also knew a lot of people whose parents were having a new baby at the same time they were having children. Not because of huge families like the fundies-- but because they had a new partner.

That's awesome your daughter got to know her great, great, great grandmother! My kids had a great- great grandmother who was still around. I was hoping that this generation of kids would have great-greats, but my parents age group are all dying earlier than their parents- so I don't think that's going to happen.

[Full enough quiver]

The women in my family seem to live well into their 90s and even hundreds. Great great great was 103 when she died.

[lawfulevil]

Woweeee! My great great greats all died like, 75 years before I was born!

Seriously. My great-great-grandmother was born in 1862 (we know this from the US census). My great-grandfather was the last of her children and was born in 1904. My great-great-great grandmother probably died in the Victorian age.

[Peas n carrots]

Wow, my great great great grandmas (the family branches I know of) were born before the US Civil War! How cool is that to have known a 3x great grandma!

[crazyforkate]

I'm almost 23. Many of my friends married near the end of college or shortly after, and now the separations are just beginning to roll in. Generally it's because they haven't planned their futures properly, or haven't taken into account that they might change as life goes on. Of course there are people who marry young and live happily for the rest of their lives, but if you're not sure who you are yet (and who is?), it really does seem like playing with fire...

[nausicaa]

Seriously. My great-great-grandmother was born in 1862 (we know this from the US census). My great-grandfather was the last of her children and was born in 1904. My great-great-great grandmother probably died in the Victorian age.

I'm thirty. My paternal grandmother was born in 1912. Her mother was born in 1882. The great x3 grandmother would have been born before the Civil War, before Britain entered New Zealand, before the Mexican American War, before the before a telegram had ever been sent.

Ironically though, my grandparents were not people who waited to get married. They were just Irish Catholic and had a crap ton of kids, and my dad is towards the bottom of the ladder and I'm the youngest in my family.

Nerdy fun fact: John Tyler (10th US President) has two living GRANDSONS. Turns out the men in the family were fond of younger women and pulled two generations of Charlie Chaplins.

[DGayle]

She doesn't get how waiting until you have a career established is a benefit these days. A couple decades ago, minimum wage went a lot further, and buying a house was so much easier. How to get by in America has changed, and by and large, people who start having kids young are fucked. They're already likely to be passed over for work for someone with more experience. Put limits on when you can work because you've got kids, and good bye, job prospect.

A big problem of "growing up together" is that you don't know who you will grow up to be just yet. If a couple people want fundamentally different things, that's bad. If they have kids, they either stay unhappily together, or split. How is this any better than waiting?

The writer of that article is lucky, nothing more. She and her husband ended up compatible after they grew up. So many people don't. The guy I was with at 20 I thought I'd be happy with forever after. Not 2 years later, he had started hitting me, and I broke it off. Thank the gods that may or may not be that trying to have a baby didn't work. In my 21-year-old mind, a baby might calm him down. In my mid-30's, I'm mature enough to see that I wasn't nearly as mature as I thought I was, and I'm mature enough now to know that I'm probably immature compared to where I will be at 60.

[skrmom]

I don't agree with marrying very young (18-20). I know of two very young couples. One couple is unable to even think of buying a home and can barely 'make rent' on an apartment b/c neither have jobs that pay well. Both were home-schooled. She works in a fast food restaurant and he does construction which pays fairly well but he is never guaranteed 40 hours a week,In winter, he has very few hours of work.

Therefore, he does not have enough income to establish credit so buying a house is out of the question.

Another couple is expecting their second child and she is just 20. Married at 18 just days after graduating from home school. As far as I know, her parents are paying for their rent.

I believe these couples would have done so much better if they could have had more education or advanced in their jobs before marrying and having babies.