Jeff Culbreath Talks About Early Marriage
After the whole FLDS fiasco, which continues to unfold, Jeff Culbreath takes a look at how delayed marriages impact society for the worse.
I tend to agree with him here - there is something unnatural about waiting until your late twenties or early thirties to marry when you are sufficiently physically mature at least a decade prior. I remember pining for a wife in 7th grade. The Church has long held the canonical minimum age requirements for marriage in early-to-teen years. Jeff makes a good point that teen promiscuity has a lot to do with the fact that our bodies are ready for something at that age that society tells us we’re not responsible enough to be committed to - intimacy.
It’s particularly evident, especially these days, that many teenage girls are ready for childbearing on a physiological level. It’s simply the American notion of the teenager and the resulting cultural immaturity that keeps marriages between the ages of 15-18 taboo. (That and the fact that we’re practically required to get a college education to get decent jobs.) Other cultures have no such stigmas on early marriage.
This outlook is damaging in other ways as well. Young men who fall in love with younger women think there’s something creepy about a 30-year-old marrying an 18-year-old, even if the feelings are mutual and the families are supportive. Thrusting the maturity required for marriage to a later age makes young men and women stay children (in their mindset) for much longer, which is then often repeated in subsequent generations. Dating, such as it is, becomes a huge temptation for young couples who truly desire spousal love but are told that they are simply being foolish, and marrying young would mean throwing away their future.
It’s because of this that I have a standing rule in my home that there will be no dating until my children are legally old enough to make that decision for themselves. In a sense, I’m catering to this philosophy of “wait till you’re older” by doing so. But in reality, I know that the prevalence of this thinking means that barring some pretty unusual circumstances, this is one area where conformity may not be entirely optional. I want my children to be happy, but I also want them to be able to eat and take care of children. If they are not capable (through lack of education and therefore poor job prospects) or responsible enough (because I, too, am a victim of prolonged adolescence and may pass it on) they really shouldn’t get married early. And dating does nothing more than make young men and women want to become more intimate.
So if they aren’t in a position to get married, they really shouldn’t be dating.
I think this is pretty simple, but I know many disagree. Then again, I know from experience that at 18, I was madly in love with a young woman, was preserved by divine grace from making some bad decisions with how to handle that attraction, and would ultimately have married her in a heartbeat.
And I would have been miserable. She wasn’t right for me.
There’s no easy way to fix what is broken, to restore lost customs that may have been better back then, but would be almost impossible to integrate now. It’s like the drinking age - it should be lowered to AT LEAST 18, but if it were, there would be a national bender among the 18-20 year olds and people would get hurt. Doing what is right, what is sensible, needs to be backed up by a culture that can handle it. That’s the problem here - I think Jeff may just be right, but I see no way of sensibly making that happen.
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I think Jeff may just be right, but I see no way of sensibly making that happen.
That’s true of so much, isn’t it?
peace,
Zach
I’m surprised that neither this post nor Mr. Culbreath’s addresses what I’ve been convinced for years is the root cause of this conundrum: a conscious effort for the last 100 years to prolong schooling for most youths, at first deep into adolescence (high school) and then, in this last generation or two, into the early and mid-twenties, with the increasing requirements of college degrees, even advanced ones, for being employed at better-than-subsistence level. (Which the elimination of the blue-collar middle class in these last 20-30 years is only exacerbating.)
An immediate side effect of this was the creation of something entirely new in human history: a sustained adolescent subculture, which became institutionalized through various forms of marketing and which, in the last two generations particularly, has generated forth such a momentum as to take over the general culture, perpetuating a cult of immaturity. (And I write as one not immune to these effects.)
It was only a matter of time and technological advance before the moral ills attendant to this unnatural and widening gap between physical and real maturity would proliferate as they have.
“And I would have been miserable. She wasn’t right for me.”
While I’m sure the wife you’ve got is the one Providence had in mind all along, I really don’t see being “wrong” for somebody as a particular barrier to a good marriage.
I mean, I don’t know the circumstances. Maybe this one was a nutter, but it’s my considered opinion (and do remember how insightful I really am) that the personalities involved in a marriage have very little to do with the quality and the success of the thing.
We could all do with a lot less “he’s my soulmate” crap, is all.
There’s a lot to chew on here and I’ve nowhere near digested it, but a couple of quick hits:
1. We have to rebuild the idea of marriage as an early goal. Right now, we give young men (especially) every out to avoid the marriage, including being able to support a family. This is the best reason, in my book.
2. There is a legitimate reason this has changed from the medieval through even the early modern industrial eras–the economics have changed. Even in my father’s time, it used to be the case that a man could leave high school and get a good job to support a wife and family. My mom was 20 and dad 21 when they got married in 1967. My late grandfather got my dad a job as a lineman at GTE and away he went. My dad didn’t get his associate’s degree until the 1990s. By that time, he was the buildings and grounds supervisor for central and northern Michigan, having risen through the ranks in a good paying job.
He warned me and my brother starting in high school that we could kiss jobs like his goodbye, and we had to go to college if we wanted to follow the same path. He was right. The catch, of course, is that college comes with bills and graduate/professional schools come wth bigger ones.
The other catch: even with his success on the job, there were enough bounces and worries in our small town economy that my dad and mom decided she needed to go to college and enter the workforce. Which she did when I was thirteen and didn’t retire until after my dad did.
My wife and I both went to college and obviously I went on to acquire my shark fin. My wife hasn’t worked since shortly D3 was born in 2003, and while I won’t bore you with details, we’ve had our share of financial worries since. The upshot is we’re paying what I call “a mortgage and a half” because of my student loans. But if I hadn’t had the loans, we wouldn’t be able to have Heather at home with the children. If you want earlier marriages, you have to make sure it is economically feasible for this to happen. Whether it is financial incentives, or fewer disincentives, but there you go.
And let me finish with this: yes, I do think there is too much of a keeping up with the Joneses/consumerist mindset that works as an excuse to delay marriage and/or children. All I ask is that we don’t let that obscure the real economic challenges for those who aren’t bent on having the latest plasma TV, newest car and largest McMansion.
Then again, I know from experience that at 18, I was madly in love with a young woman, was preserved by divine grace from making some bad decisions with how to handle that attraction, and would ultimately have married her in a heartbeat.
Been there, done that, did you one better: I actually proposed to the wrong woman. I’m convinced we would have divorced had she not broken the engagement.
I think there is a lot of wisdom here. The economy makes it nearly impossible to marry young anymore and the young marriages that I know of are experiencing a lot of difficulties due to financial pressures and immaturity. As a result it is imperative that kids not start dating at 13 or 14 b/c they sure as heck can’t marry at 16 or in most cases even at 19.
I think the difficult economy dictated later marriages in Ireland in the last century and now almost no one marries at all.
What can I say, when you have teenagers all you can do is say, “Life is hard. Pray harder.”
You know, this whole thing that’s going on with Miley Cirus (aka “Hannah Montana”) right now seems to play into this discussion.
On the one hand, we Catholics have a wholesome revulsion toward the early sexualization of our daughters. On the other, we recognize that in different circumstances, girls in their teens could and did marry successfully.
The disparity between sexual maturity and emotional or economic maturity is the big issue here. Because bodies develop, become attractive, and desires arise, the prolonged gap between when one COULD get married and when one actually DOES get married is going to continue being a problem as it widens.
It leads to sex without committment. Funny how society pushes us to believe our kids will have sex anyway, so teach them how to be “safe”, but marriage is something that they definitely don’t want until they are much, much older because it’s too big of a responsibility.
I wonder, too, if the education paradigm we’re under will last. It’s becoming increasingly meaningless to have a BA, and you need more and more education. On the other hand, I am willing to bet we’ll see a trend toward self-education and distance education over the internet that will rebalance some of the economic burden that normal college puts on people.
Some of the most successful people today, particularly in internet startups, never even went to college.
“He warned me and my brother starting in high school that we could kiss jobs like his goodbye, and we had to go to college if we wanted to follow the same path.”
My step-dad told me the same thing. He started off at age 19 digging trenches for PG&E back in the 50s. He worked his way up to Senior Engineering Estimator, with no college apart from a few math courses - a position he still holds today. Needless to say, PG&E doesn’t do things that way anymore. Ditch-diggers remain ditch-diggers.
“I’m surprised that neither this post nor Mr. Culbreath’s addresses what I’ve been convinced for years is the root cause of this conundrum: a conscious effort for the last 100 years to prolong schooling for most youths …”
An excellent point, Somerset. This is central to the whole problem. It is of course related to industrialization and the modern economy, but I still think “education” in our times is overdone due primarily to social motives (which often enough hide behind economic motives). I have 90+ year old relatives who received better high school educations than today’s college graduates.
[...] marriage and related subjects continue to be discussed by Steve Skojec, Dale Price, and the Young Fogey. Lots to think [...]
Early marriage has rarely been common among West Europeans, defined as those living west and north of a line drawn between St. Petersburg and Trieste and their descendants overseas.
For example, the median age of marriage in 17th-century England was 26 for women and 28 for men.
That’s for ordinary people, of course; aristocrats married younger. It was just as common for people to wait past 30 as to marry in their teens. Granted the age of puberty was later then, but not by all that much — 2 or 3 years.
Married people had to have their own “hearth”; enough resources or skills to live independently. There was what amounted to an iron taboo against two married couples under the same roof, and dependent laborers usually lived as unmarried ’servants’ in the households of their employers, regarded as children whatever their age.
Apprenticeship and the slow accumulation of capital and skills meant that real socially acknowledged ‘adulthood’ was just as delayed as it is now. Rather more so, if anything, since so many never achieved it at all.
That’s typical of the area for the whole period we have any data, right back into Early Modern and Late Medieval times.
Also, prior to the Industrial Revolution very poor people in that area didn’t marry at all, usually. To take that 17th-century example again, in the England of Charles II, up to 25% of women never married — and never had children.
That’s how they practiced birth control. Married couples didn’t; they usually had children at 18-24 month intervals from marriage to menopause or other physical source of infertility. That’s a ‘natural’ rythm, in the absence of any deliberate restriction of fertility except prolonged breast-feeding of infants.
They limited births, and limited them quite sharply, by delaying marriage until a full 10 years after puberty (cutting the woman’s potential number of children by about 5), and by low ‘nuptiality’ levels — many never-married individuals who didn’t reproduce.
And of course by keeping extra-marital fertility levels very low. The evidence suggests that most men and nearly all women were virgins when married (or when publicly engaged, which was about the same thing) and that women who didn’t marry for the most part died ‘virgo intacta’.
Age at marriage dipped and nuptiality increased sharply when land or employment were abundant, as in the American colonies or during the great economic boom of the late 18th century.
We tend to think of the marital habits of that period or of the American farming frontier as typical of the “past”, but it’s not so. As far as delaying marriage into the mid/late 20’s goes, we’re actually quite typical of our ancestors.
The rest of the world has usually had a pattern of early and universal marriage, especially for women, but seems to be switching over to the Western system.
Anyone with common sense surely understands that early marriage is a good predictor of early divorce. I’m sorry, sports fans, but some marriages aren’t meant to happen. And to “encourage” teens into marrying as soon as possible is just this side of child abuse.
It isn’t thousands of years of wisdom, but rather several decades of sentimentality that drives the radical reaction against singlehood in one’s adult years. I’m a conservative, and believe me, every married conservative whom I know hadn’t been hitched even by 25, much less 20. There is something sick about herding people to the altar.
In point of fact, our ancestors were wise. People younger than their mid-20’s simply aren’t competent to make adult decisions.
Their brains haven’t finished wiring yet.
Eg., the risk management center shuts down at puberty and doesn’t fully recover until your 20’s, which is why guys in their late teens and early 20’s have advantages as soldiers… 8-).
If I had my way, the minimum age for marriage (and voting) would be 24.
Thanks, everyone, for your responses. The historical perspective is an interesting one…I don’t know enough to agree with it or challenge it, only that I have an understanding of Church law on the topic which led me to believe that earlier marriage was a more common occurrence than Mr. Stirling’s depiction.
If it isn’t so, then perhaps it is with good reason. As I said, I’m of two minds on the subject in the contemporary context, and if circumstances were similarly prohibitive in the past, then maybe there’s always been a dichotomy here.
I can only reiterate the fact that biologically, we desire a mate (to put it crassly) in our mid-to-late teenage years, but societally we are held off until much, much later. If this doesn’t contribute to teen promiscuity, I’m not sure what does. It seems odd to me that we would desire something most strongly at a time that is ultimately premature.
Speaking for myself, I was married at twenty-five. I admit that I was immature, and that only now after five years of marriage to I feel that I’m even beginning to hit my stride on how to act and live as a husband and father. My poor wife has suffered much because of my immaturities, and it’s a credit to her that she stuck by me through it all.
But that doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with Mr. Horowitz. I believe that the immaturity of youth is relative to the culture. In America, we train our children to be children for much longer, and they meet our expectations. The perpetual adolescence we see starting with some of the baby boomers on down is a feature of this.
On the other hand, my father-in-law was presented to leave China at the age of 14. He came to this country knowing almost no one, having grown up in a poor rural village in Guangdong. He settled in California (his family did not come with him) working in grocery stores and butcher’s markets until he was old enough to enlist in the Navy, thus expediting his path to citizenship. He became a man at a young age because he was brought up a certain way, and because opportunity and circumstances made him capable.
How often in history have we seen youths who have accomplished much, either through heroism or infamy? In the religious realm we have saints like Tarcisius, Maria Goretti, and Joan of Arc. In the secular realm there was Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, and Tutankhamun. In the contemporary age we have young CEOs like the founders of Facebook, Digg, and YouTube.
These are examples that simply come to mind off the top of my head, but I simply disagree that age is the necessary path to maturity. Maturity has more to do with nurture than nature, I think.