Is It Better To Marry Young?

On the surface, the answer to this question is emphatically no. The divorce rate for those marrying in their teens and early 20s is astronomical. And the risk of marriage failure decreases with age until about 30, after which the divorce risk levels off and starts to climb again. Moreover, the trend is for people to marry later, not earlier, reflecting I think the trend of slowing rates of maturity in both men and women. Adolescence appears to be extended by formal schooling; since a greater and greater proportion of the population attends college after high school, a greater proportion of the population's development is retarded, if not completely arrested. At least until after they graduate.

However, I was intrigued by this post by Laura that bucks the prevailing wisdom. Rather than advise women to wait to marry until after their habits and sense of "independence" are set and become barriers to becoming interdependent with their husbands, she advises young women to marry right out of high school or while they are in college, to men in their mid- to late 20s:

It is common advice these days to not get married until you have "discovered yourself". It is recommended that after college one should spend a few years single and explore the world. Theories are that the better one knows themselves, the better one will be able to adapt to marriage. Sorry to say, but you aren't marrying yourself.

I feel this kind of advice is damaging to young people. It forces them to spend more time focusing on themselves.

I married relatively young at 26 and that I am not like many women in their 30s who have lived alone so long that they openly admit that they don't want to get married just because they would have to readjust the life they have grown so accustomed to. Even after living a few years on my own before marriage, I still find that I have bad habits that I need to be constantly conscious of. These habits only developed because I had years to "discover myself" and not care about anyone else.

I came across a good article on the subject called "Say Yes, What Are You Waiting For" by Mark Regnerus:

Most young women are mature enough to handle marriage. According to data from the government's National Survey of Family Growth, women who marry at 18 have a better shot at making a marriage work than men who marry at 21. There is wisdom in having an age gap between spouses. For women, age is (unfortunately) a debit, decreasing fertility. For men, age can be a credit, increasing their access to resources and improving their maturity, thus making them more attractive to women. We may all dislike this scenario, but we can't will it away.

As I happened to marry a man 10 years older, I agree that age for men is a credit. I never had any interest in guys my age who always seemed to lack the maturity and were unable to maintain a stable job. Also guys my age were too feminized to understand what it means to be a real husband.

This is an interesting thesis that Laura forwards, one that I hadn't thought of before. Previously, I had seized upon the divorce statistics, correlated them with my own negative experience (sample size == 1) of marrying a young woman, both of us straight out of college, and recommended to all comers that men should only marry in their late 20s to a woman who is herself in her late 20s. Of course, they only have a narrow window of time to have children*--if that is their desire--but if his goal as a man was to be married and stay married and stay out of the divorce mills then marrying later is the course of action with the highest probability for success.

Perhaps Laura is onto something here, an intuitive "rediscovery" of the wisdom of auld: that it is better for women to go straight from their parent's household to that of her husband's with as minimal a time spent in independent living as possible. In doing so, a woman hopefully fails to acquire the bad habits of the World, to include an excessive sense of independence which inhibits her ability to later develop interdependent behavior with her husband.

Yet while women should marry young, the pattern for men marrying later would still hold...a man should marry when he is older--late 20s, say--after he has had the time he needs to become established and to acquire the resources and skills and maturity required to be able to successfully lead his family. As both Regnerus (the author of the WaPo article) and Laura both opine, age is an asset for men, but is rarely so for a woman. Seems to me, then, that the best course of action would be to leverage this social fact, this innate difference between the sexes, and pair younger women with men several years their senior. It seems to me that doing this is wiser than fighting nature by attempting to pair partners of increasingly similar ages together (today less than 2 years apart in age) with the knowledge that their chances for success aren't appreciably better and may be worse than the young woman - older man (the "May - June") coupling. Regnerus again:

Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life.

In other words, it is more difficult to teach an old dog new tricks.

I can hear some of the objections now, one of which is that a woman should go through college, get experience, date many men, have a career, and then, almost as an afterthought, get married. It is nigh upon scandalous to go through college with the goal of finding a husband. Yet we see the failure of this line of reasoning each and every day, as millions of women, after having gone through college and become established in careers and climb the corporate ladder, wake up in their mid 30s with no husband in sight and a profound sense of loneliness and regret, with her fertility falling off a cliff. Moreover, college is no guarantor of economic success; rather, it loads a woman up with debt for a sheepskin of questionable worth that, when combined with that of her husband, makes for a punishing set of initial economic conditions for any couple. Furthermore, "getting experience" via modern dating is a sure-fire way to acquire a bad attitude about men and relationships...if a woman is seeking short-term relationships or is out to "have a good time", well she's bound to meet men who are interested in those things too. In other words, she'll baseline her database of what hominus masculus is and does based off of the behaviors of players, thugs, and PUAs. I suspect that she's likely as not to find that those fellows have dating behaviors that don't leave a positive impression, and come to the incorrect conclusion that "all men are pigs" or some such baloney.

In closing, I think this is a very powerful observation that Laura had:

[When you are married, y]ou don't end up thinking about yourself all the time...when I am buying fun things, I think twice now about whether it is really necessary...before, I just bought whatever cause it was all about me.

Today's women and men are locked in a state of socially acceptable navel-gazing from the time they hit adolescence through their late 20s. But such behavior is harmful times two, in that not only do today's young men become semi-permanent constituents of "guy land", today's young women become residents of "chick land" as well. In both worlds, it's all about "me me me", and that pattern of behavior is difficult to break. Particularly women who naturally want to dominate their men but chafe when they are allowed to do so, and men who'd just as soon not be yoked like that.

* One of the downsides of feminism is that it fosters a norm of late family formation...which suppresses lifetime fertility, increases the risk of birth defects in children, and heightens the risk of disease in women.

Update: Maybe this post by Novaseeker provides yet another reason why women (and men too) should marry straightaway and forgo college...the college culture leads them into behavior patterns and norms harmful for downstream marriages.