To ask what you think about young Christian marriages?

[Ihavewelliesbutitssunny]

So over the last few years I've known a lot of young Christian couples who've got married at about 21-23 years old. The classic situation is Christian boy and girl meet at the CU at uni and then get married when they graduate. Obviously part of this is the belief that couples shouldn't have sex before they are married but I think another factor is that they have prayed through and considered their decision to get married and trust that if it is the right decision they should just go ahead and get married. There seems often to be a critical and confused response to this idea of getting married from non-Christians so I was interested to see the mumsnet response. I suspose the idea of waiting for sex and getting married young is something that a lot of couples did in the past and many of us have grandparents or perhaps parents who married young and have had very long (and in most cases) marriages.

It's not that being young and a Christian necessarily means your marriage is going to be a nasty, repressive, sexist, abusive waste of a chunk of your life. It's more that the type of Christian organisations which promote abstinence and early marriage are generally the sexist, homophobic, nasty, repressive ones.
In general, a man who wants a virgin bride is a man who is shit in bed and doesn't want to learn to improve his technique.
There have been quite a few threads on MN in the past from women in horribly abusive marriages, who married young for superstitious reasons and discovered that the men they had married were horrible or at least unsatisfactory - and these women were finding it hard to get away as the 'community' of superstitious crap peddlers were basically telling them to suck it up - whether that was a man who treated them like servants, beat them up or was spending all his time on gay websites and threatening to kill them if they told anyone else.
When people allow their superstitions to focus on and control their sexual behaviours, it's never very healthy.

I have to agree to some extent with SGB's assessment there. There are societies where the idea of people being single into their 30s presents difficulties but they are not necessarily religious ones. My exILs married young in 1950s America -- the zeitgeist swept them up; they were very inclined to nag the BILs and SILs to settle down and they really pushed the idea of marriage and having children.

I think in some cases there is a hurry to marry that arises out of a desire to do away with the sort of grey areas or uncertainties that can exist in a relationship, or an attraction to the idea of having everything settled, done and dusted. I also agree that there seems to be more than the usual amount of using women as beards.

I think SGVB says it pretty well.

Oh you would! :o

Marrying young can work out, but I think it's having kids that really puts a strain on a relationship. If they've thought about it etc, then go for it, but share lots of time together, travelling, doing the carefree 'young' stuff and hopefully there's a lot to draw on when kids arrive.