Recently, I received an invitation in the mail to a wedding reception from a friend. As I get older, that’s going to be less surprising, especially as my friends who were upperclassmen when I was a freshman or sophomore in high school are beginning to graduate and start families.
What may be surprising is that the friend in question was in my graduating class. She recently turned 21, and she already has her degree.
Another friend of mine that I met while at USC Sumter, also in her early 20s, got married within the past year.
When I was in high school, a girl who was a recent graduate was proposed to at an open mic night. I told my parents, and their first question was: “How old is she?”
I still find it interesting that they didn’t ask me about the groom-to-be’s age, and that age is the first question at all.
Why not ask if they’re financially stable? Or if they have a place to live? To me, these are elements that matter more than age, especially the focus on the bride’s age versus the groom’s.
The main factor that seems more important to me than age is whether or not you can support yourself and your spouse financially.
Even if your family supports your decision to get married and may be able to help you with money, being able to bring in a paycheck is still a key component in starting a life on your own.
Similarly, it’s helpful if you have your own apartment or house before you tie the knot. A married couple needs their own nest to really make their marriage work.
It’s easier to be a happy couple when you have other people as a buffer, but once it’s just the two of you day in and day out, you start to get to know each other — for better or for worse.
Of course, the maturity of both people involved is an important factor in a marriage, or really most relationships, period. At a young age, it’s easy to overlook something like that, to even find it endearing how “youthful” and “carefree” the other person is.
That can change quickly, though, with those euphemisms devolving into ugly words like “childish” and “careless.” It’s important to be sure you’re on the same level with your partner, because you need to be able to discuss responsibilities like rent, other bills and your future itself without it leading to an argument.
And it’s true that it’s entirely possible that two people who are on the same level and love each other very much in their early 20s could just grow apart as they get older, with no one being less mature or more mature than the other.
But that’s a risk you take at any age. We never really stop growing or maturing no matter how old we are. You can only hope that you and your partner end up in the same place, and try to help each other get there.
Maybe it’s a benchmark of a cynical world that we hold young marriages in disdain. Or maybe it just shows how much society has changed, that we put careers and getting ahead in front of holy matrimony.
Either way, I’m happy for my friends. But it doesn’t matter what I think, and it doesn’t even matter what their families think. It certainly doesn’t matter what society at large may think.
It only matters what they think — it’s their marriages, and their lives.