Marry Young

I know this goes counter to every warning and most advice you will hear, especially in today’s culture of uncertainty, but let me make my case.

 

First let me acknowledge the reality.  Young adults, if they marry at all, do so at a much later age than has ever been the norm in America. Why?  Because they are afraid.  They look at the statistics—of the divorces, of their resources, of the prospects, and they freeze up. 

 

Formerly, at least in the first six decades of 20^th Century America, a young couple looked forward to making a life together— having a courtship, being in love, marrying, getting a job, working together, expecting a time of penny-pinching, having children, establishing a starter home of their own, and assuming there would be stability, fidelity, teamwork and commitment . . . and happiness.

 

All of this did not start after the person was ‘established.’  It came through the process.

The McGuire Sisters’ song, “Love and Marriage” (or almost any Doris Day song) sums it up nicely (or idealistically):

“Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.  This I tell you brother, you can’t have one without the other.

It’s an institute you can’t disparage

Ask the local gentry, they will say it’s elementary.

Dad was told by mother; you can’t have one without the other.” 

As I see it—and have experienced it—marriage can be ‘an institut[ion] you can’t disparage’ if you just do it right.  It is a wonderful God-ordained institution that satisfies not only a person’s natural instincts, but builds the participants and creates and lends stability to any society that encourages and protects it. 

 

But here’s what has damaged it so badly in the last half-century:

·                  The ‘pill.’  Curtailing the birth of children has left the marriage with two legs of a three-legged stool.  It is unnatural and unstable.  The focus for happiness of the couple (alone) has been turned inward (to self) rather than outward (to spouse) and what they through their love-union can create (family).  Selfishness (childlessness) always erodes happiness as the honeymoon ends or the blush fades from the rose petal. 

·                     Materialism.  When people want ‘things’ more than they want to make another person happy and secure then they find it necessary to go out of the home (women in particular) to pay for these things.  Temptations in the marketplace (things or other people) always exist.  Once a material focus develops there is no end to it.  The ‘family’ is relegated to second-fiddle.

·                     Loosened moral standards and pornography.  If the safety mechanisms of conscience and time-honored standards of morality and decency as taught by true religion are disregarded then the satisfying marriage or hoped-for marriage has little chance of survival or even establishment.  If a young man or older man gets caught in the web of pornography (and it is nearly instantaneous if/when he opens or goes to the book, magazine, or website or business) it is a sure forecast of proximate or ultimate ruination.  It may be the fastest addiction.  Then the addict quickly learns that this object of his focus becomes his master (or mistress)—a fantasy or even physiological substitution for the real thing.  A sound marriage and an addiction cannot exist together.
 

·                    So-called No-fault divorce.  Of course someone is at fault-- that’s the problem. At least one of the couple has not learned, has forgotten, disregarded, or devalued the initial marriage expectation.  Unless a standard of commitment and responsibility and unity of values is acknowledged and committed to, the resultant pseudo- marriage or ‘relationship’ has a built-in easy escape clause. Hearts are broken and people are damaged.

 

So why marry young?  Marry while adjustment is easier—before your life becomes inflexible.  Marry so you can protect each other.  Marry so you can build a great thing together.  Marry so you are out of the temptations of the world that beguile and afflict and capture the vulnerable.  Marry so you can find and give happiness with/to another person and in the process gain the greatest satisfactions of life.   

The longer one waits, the more negative things (selfishness, materialism, sublimating addictions, attitudes of non-commitment—divorce, bankruptcy, etc.) have time to become established.

This is the old-school view.  And do you know what?  In most cases it worked!