The other day I was talking to a guy who was about my age, just exchanging pleasantries. He asked about kids and I told him about mine. He was surprised when he heard that my oldest daughter is 31. "Wow! You must have married young!"
I never thought I married young, but I had to look into it. According to the Census Bureau, men of my age group back when I got married were averaging just under 25 years old. I married at 22. Yeah, young ... but not very. Unless, of course, you compare it to today. By today's standards, I married very young. Currently males marry at nearly 28 and females at nearly 26. There are more who are not married at all and it is not uncommon to wait until your thirties to get married today. Why do you suppose that is? Why is the average age of the first marriage going up?
The number one answer offered by society today is that career comes first. Before you marry you want to get yourself settled into a lucrative career with steady income, good benefits, and good prospects. In other words, "I need to get myself on track before I settle down." Interestingly (at least to me), the second most common reason offered is a commitment to fun. "If I get married, I won't be able to travel or do all the things I want to do." So they put off commitment because they want to live it up. Marriage, you see, terminates life, at least in some regards. Close behind the desire to live it up is the drive for education. That makes sense, I suppose, given that the first goal was to establish a career. The higher your education, the more you make, right? Stands to reason ... except that in America higher education is dropping off, especially among males. So I wonder.
I'm not really in disagreement with these answers. The reason age of marriage is going up is our personal devotion to self. "I want" occurs long before and at a far higher priority than "I do". I suspect, however, that there are other reasons that aren't showing up on the radar screen of answers. I think, for instance, that marriage has suffered a general decline in terms of reputation. With higher divorce rates lots of people are saying, "Why marry if it's just going to end up in divorce?" A close kin, then, is the "Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?" Whatever you do, don't analyze that sentence too closely. It's disgusting from all sorts of angles. If "the milk" is sex, the suggestion is that the only reason anyone would marry is for sex. Wrong. And, seriously, what woman (or man) wants to be referred to as "the cow"? And are all relationships really that mercenary? Wrong in so many ways. Also related, I think, is the problem of multiple relationships and breakups. Do that over time and you're going to become gunshy, so to speak. It will leave scars. People who married early wouldn't have as many relationships and breakups to deal with, so they're operating on a different system.
I think there are likely two more factors that you won't find in most studies. First, while most people will disagree with me, I think that today's youth are maturing much, much later than they were in the mid-20th century. Oh, they have more information and more input. They may have more knowledge. They may know more than their parents did at their age. But I'm talking about maturity, the sense of personal responsibility for self and others. They've called the recent generations "the boomerang generation" because so many leave home only to end up back home. They couldn't make it. They still need help. Self-sufficiency isn't an option, let alone commitment to and being sufficient for someone else. The other factor, I believe, is this constant striving to remove differences between genders. In earlier times everyone knew that men were less interested in commitment than women. Women were expected to be virginal, but young men were practically expected to "sow their wild oats". Wrong as that might be, that's the way it was. But Women's Liberation has come along and gender equality is all the rage and now we're encouraging women to be just as bad as men always were. For the longest time "nudie" magazines were for men. Women really had no interest. And it wasn't odd at all. Men were more visually driven while women were more emotionally driven. But Women's Liberation has changed all that. Women are now expected to be as visually stimulated and sexually raunchy as men. So instead of taming the wild male, women are going wild. This would tie into my earlier premise -- the later maturing -- but also into the problem of marriage. I mean, if you are devoted first to your own pleasure and your own pleasure is to have as many partners as possible, then putting off marriage is a given.
There are those, of course, who argue that marrying later is a good thing. Well, of course they would. Since it is already the case, we want to think that we're doing things better now than before. So we feed self-centeredness above all else and commit to personal pleasure rather than responsibility. We demean marriage as a questionable institution at all and then strip it of any meaning at all. We feed immaturity and call it normal and strip away the "gentler" part of the gentler sex and call it progress. To me, these are not good reasons for marrying later in life. Fortunately for me, I married too young.
4 comments:
Good post, Stan. Full of lots of truths! (Not to imply they are ever anything other than!)
I can hardly imagine any young person not being "gun shy" about marriage these days when, all their lives, they have all been touched by multiple divorces. If it wasn't their own parents who divorced, it was other people they loved, cared about, or of which they at least knew and had thought loved each other a lot and were then shocked and disappointed to find out otherwise.
My husband and I have 3 kids of our own. They are now 2 young adults and 1 young teen. And he, I, and they (because the 22 yr. old moved back) still all live under the SAME roof! Big deal? Well, almost. Sadly, among our kids' friends' family situations we have become an anomaly. We 5 have all cried at the news of impending divorces of some couples who have been very dear to us though. Multiple best friends have moved away ~ just to name one of the ripple effects of those divorces.
Their friends' young lives are often so very complicated. At the end of their visits, do we drive these kids home to their mom and her boyfriend's house? Their dad and step-mom's house? Their grandparent's house? Or their daycare provider's house? Will they be spending this summer out of state with their "real dad" or will they be here with their mom and step-dad this summer? When they talk about their grandparents, which grandparents? The original ones or the ones from their parents' second or third marriages? When they talk about one of their siblings, do they mean their sister, half-sister, or step-sister? We try to memorize which weekends their friends are at which parent's house. Many of the kids themselves seem weary of their constant need to be uprooted and shuffled around in order for all these people to be able to spend time with them. We sometimes hear stories about them not at all liking whoever their parents are currently dating and bringing home.
For all the reasons you wrote about and for this, no wonder people today might be much more fearful and hesitant about settling down into marriages of their own than ever before! It's made up of victims of the many painful, complicated, and difficult consequences of divorce.
I agree with you, too, about the maturity levels of young people these days. Most have not been FORCED both by their circumstances and what was expected of them by society to grow up as quickly as they had to in the past and so they have not! A lot could be said about this, but my husband and I think that at least SOME of that immaturity could have something to do with endless hours of video game-playing for years on end. In the past, teenage boys might have been out working on their own cars on a sunny day, learning something valuable, but now they are often inside doing mindless things like playing a video game in which they are racing around in little pretend cars. Or, like you wrote about yesterday, instead of being outside taking care of and then sometimes also butchering real livestock and growing and harvesting real crops for food, they are sitting at computers playing games like Farmville.
It's a beautiful day here today and I've got a couple 20 year old guys sitting a few feet away from me playing a video game right now. They aren't what I'd call lazy guys either. They're just pretty typical of guys their age these days. (I'll chase them out sometime after I get my own self away from sitting in front of a screen!)
People ARE still getting married though and young people might be less mature in some ways in their 20s now than they used to be but they are not stupid. (I like to think this anyway.) They have been observing what works and what does not. There's still hope. There are just going to be an awful lot of MUCH older brides, grooms, parents, and grandparents in the days to come, aren't there?!
I posted this on Saturday because this is my least read day and I figured I'd get very little positive feedback at all on this particular post. Shows what I know, eh?
I agree with you. I agree on the tragedy of divorce and the confusion and pain it causes and on the problem of kids not being required to become responsible adults and ... well, you know, what you said.
It's creepy how much I think I might be starting to sound like my dad however. You know, the old, "Back in my day...." sort of things. Yikes!
It's even creepier that, when part of the Olympics coverage momentarily became boring this evening, I flipped channels, happened upon an old Lawrence Welk show, and I actually STAYED a few minutes, watched, and even almost enjoyed a few songs, and then a great little dance number by Bobby and Cissy! (Heaven help me. Shake it off! Just shake it off! Except Bobby and Sissy were ALWAYS cool so I don't want to shake them off.)
The wholesomeness of that show from a much more civil and genteel time in human history was....uh....astoundingly wholesome! The female singers and dancers weren't dressed like they were in a burlesque show, like the female performers so very often are now. Those very attractive young women were dressed in pretty dresses and behaving classy and lady-like, instead of like brazen, tough chick seductresses, prancing around leaving very little to the imagination.
Okay, well, the dad is coming out again! So... goodbye.
And nobody had tattoos on the Lawrence Welk Show!
That show was part of the regimen when I spent the weekend with my grandparents. Grandma would insist on Grandpa and me joining her in the TV room for the whole hour. I would have preferred seeing the Supremes or Eric Burden and the Animals, let it be said.
Is anybody besides me a Tijuana Brass fan these days?
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