Emily Becker wanted to be married by age 30. In June, at age 28, she and Joe Becker, 29, were married. They were the last of their group to tie the knot.
Even though they began dating in 2003 ”” around the same time as most of their friends ”” “it took us almost twice as long to get married,” she says. “We both knew we wanted to marry each other. We just kept having to put it off.”
he reason? Careers. Both are doctors. They spent four years in medical school. Three years of residency were in different cities. They got engaged in October of last year and now live in San Francisco.
“If we had been together in the same city, I think maybe we would have married sooner,” he says.
I think that anyone who wants to get married before age 25 is clinically insane. I got married at 29, and I think that was as good an age as any. You’re mature enough but not too old to be completely stuck in your ways.
The only reason marriages are perforce later is because the education establishment has imposed an extended adolescence on youth that defies all biological reason. Women having (or, as often as not, [i]not[/i] having) children in their 30’s is bad science and bad social policy.
Byzantine, Why do you say women having children in their 30’s is bad science and bad social policy? This defies all biological reason…. God made women able to bear children in their thirties. I think the bad science thing only applies to the other end…. not having children earlier as well.
I think Byzantine might have meant women waiting untill their thirties to have children.
Gven that Tradition holds that the Mother of our Lord was in her teens when she gave birth, fifteen I think, it seems logical that any lower age restriction (or a higher one) is merely a pragmatic one made due to the prevailing social structure to support young familes.
Lower quality eggs, greater toll on the woman’s body, elderly grandparents unable or unwilling to assist in childrearing, high expenses and time constraints for parents when they need the latitude to take their relationship to the next level and prepare for old age together, telling men and women at their virility/fertility peaks that it’s going to be another five to ten years…It’s a pretty long list.
The delay of marriage until the mid-twenties would be an unmitigated benefit if it came with the requisite spiritual discipline of chastity. Unfortunately, as a society we have accepted fornication as a cost of delaying marriage only to discover within our marriages the spiritual damage caused by fornication. The more technologically advanced we become the more spiritual discipline we need not less.
I’m probably a bad example, as I’m a late marrier (and my wife even more so) simply by virtue of it having taken that long to find a spouse (plus a courtship which according to our friends was excessively protracted, but hey…). I have to say, though, that it would have been nice to have been married earlier, just by virtue of the stamina needed to raise kids.
A little closer look at the graph on the left of the article tells an interesting story, however. First, the parallelism of the two lines is quite striking; whatever forces affect male age also seem to affect female age, or vice versa. Second, at least within the time window the male age at first marriage is historically high, but not strikingly so. The drop from 1950 to 1960 alone is as great as the cumulative rise from 1890 to 2007. Finally, the other big trend is that the female age is converging on the male age. This is something the article doesn’t touch on.
The_Archer_of_the_Forest, can you help me locate a good psychiatrist then? I was 18.5 and my husband was not quite 24 when we tied the knot. We’ve been insane together for over 31 years! Our oldest son and his wife (married in 2002) are also clinically insane too.
Wait a minute. Ideal age for [b][i]first[/i][/b] marriage?
spt+
I got married seven weeks after my 21st birthday, during spring break of my junior year in college. We’ll have been married for 19 years come April. Seemed right at the time. Four children later, it still seems right.
William Shontz
Sheepdog,
I made my previous comment somewhat tongue in cheek, but I imagine your first few years of marriage were very difficult too, where they not? Marriage is difficult in the best of circumstances.
I question the judgment that says marriage is eaier if done later. Are not habbits of living single stronger the older you are? All marriages should be somewhat difficult in the first few years. The divorce stats referenced in the article don’t tell us very much other than those who get married later are probably less likely to get divorced because by that age more of the foolish have already gotten married and divorced. It tells us nothing about how possible it is to be as wise at an earlier age. It would be like sending a group of soldiers into a war zone and judging the danger of the stages of that battle by the casualties when it stands to reason that the casualties would be less at the end of the battle because the poorer soldiers would have died at a greater number in the beginning and at the end there would be a greater percentage of skilled soldiers.
Age is nothing. Wisdom and perseverance are everything. I have known older people with not have so much of that as some younger people.
I got married at 39, not long after I was gently told by my family that I was getting more and more particular, and less and less desirable….. Sometimes only family can say the truth!
Now happily married with children.
Presentism + Parochialism = Americanism
Of people who have married, I expect the vast majority around the world today and throughout history have done so before they were 25. Certainly, in any case, the women.
What fools, these Hittites and Samoans and Mayans and Kazakhs and Chinese and Congolese! How did/do they ever expect to afford a decent co-op on the Upper East Side? And with kids? Forget about it!
My son and daughter in law married at 21, three years ago. When a non-Christian friend told me that she thought they were far too young to get married, I asked her whether she thought they were too young to live together. She didn’t. Bizarre.
Odd. We all know people who got married when they were young and the marriage never skipped a beat. And we know people who waited until they were mature and financially secure and their marriage developed dry rot in a year or two. And t’other way around. The issue seems to be whether the participants got married because it seemed like a good idea or because they could not imagine life any other way than married to each other. Well, I dunno, but I do know this, and I am supported by Dear Abby (who knew everything), that a surprising number of people, at any age, see – just see! that’s all – their future spouses and say to themselves, “He/She is for me.” And it turns out to be true, year after year.
You know people like this, don’t you? How can this be? Larry