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.

Yes, dd1 is getting married next year in a Catholic church ( they're both 23 )
They will have to attend marriage preparation sessions for quite a few weeks which I think is a great thing ( although we didn't have anything like that and we're still together )

Yeah, but you appear to be a Nun Ry :o

thanks cheerfulyank

Bless you my child

I can't see how anyone would argue that marrying young and for life isn't a good thing? ( unless marriage isn't really for you ) it has to be better than stumbling from one relationship to another.

I think they are probably, on the whole, better than young Christian murders or young Christian homopaedophiliac encounters.

I don't think marriage is for everyone, it didn't suit me.

There's a lot of pressure on these young people (I was part of a church at that group) to find a partner and marry. And lots of praying for strength to deny the plesures of the flesh etc.

I think, why bother. Do it or don't, who cares, why are Christians so terribly concerned about what other people do with their genitals? And why is it better to not know each other inside out (as it were) before signing your life away? I'll almost certainly never marry/ co-habit again, but if something very unexpected happened, I sure as hell would want to know what I was getting into!

"I can't see how anyone would argue that marrying young and for life isn't a good thing? ( unless marriage isn't really for you ) it has to be better than stumbling from one relationship to another."

Are you suggesting that there's no middle ground between these two extremes?

Personally I think that for a very few people marrying young is a good idea. For most it's a disaster!

Well, I had a lot of fun "stumbling from one relationship to another". But I also learned a lot about myself too. I was in a much better position to commit to a serious relationship when I met DH, because I knew what I did and didn't want out of a relationship, and I was also in control of my sexuality. I had no doubts at all when I got married that DH was the right one.

For what it's worth, I know of a couple who didn't have sex before marriage (my Mum's generation, so fear of pregnancy as well as religious reasons), they found out that they were completely sexually incompatible, he ended up having an affair and they divorced when the children were old enough. :( And another, of my generation, where there has been a bit of a bumpy road; a lot of soul searching and some regrets that they didn't have any other partners in their youth.

Obviously there are also very happy marriages out there. But I was brought up that the "right" way to go about things was to have only one sexual partner and not to have sex until I was engaged/married and would have been a bit of a disaster for me. I'm very glad that I bucked the trend.

Marrying young and for life is hardly 'extreme'.

DH and I did not have sex with each other before marriage. When we married I was 23 and he was 27. We will have been married for 5 years next week, and we have two children. We are both active in the church of England.
For us, saving sex until marriage was really difficult ... but totally worth it. We certainly weren't totally hands off , in fact we were very sure we were sexually compatible beforehand, and that's very much proved to be the case. However, we had had previous sexual partners. I don't know if that makes a difference, but we both knew what we were doing .
Reflecting upon it, I don't think we are 'born again' by any stretch of the imagination but we certainly decided, when we got together, to return to the church that we'd drifted away from and try to mirror its teaching in our relationship. Without a doubt, our relationship has faced challenges due to the process of maturation that is still in progress when you marry young. We also faced external challenges in the form of reccurent miscarriages, DD1's medical needs in infancy and DH's deployments with the medical corps. Knowing that it is 'for keeps', barring adultery or abuse, has helped us weather many storms and we have come to a place where both of us are extraordinarily happy.

Sorry, that sounded unbearably smug

We got married (humanist wedding) at 21 having been together for 6 years in an open relationship. We were terribly odd teenagers, we knew that we wanted to be together for a long time pretty early in our relationship and decided that an open relationship would increase our chances of making it work, especially as we went to university a couple of hours apart.

We got married to 'close' our relationship as we wanted DC and decided that an open relationship would be too complicated while we had young DC. We have been together for 12 years, married for 6 of them and are regularly described as sickeningly happy

So I have no objection in principle to getting married young but I do wonder if the not having sex before marriage encourages people to marry earlier than they perhaps would if they were shagging.

My mother was 21 and a devout Catholic virgin when she married my father, two years after they met. I know (though I wish I didn't!) that they had a lot of problems with thanks to the inappropriate spoutings of my alcoholic father and my mother's reactions sex. I can imagine when it's built up so much that it can be a problem. My mother said that they really only got married to have it, and then it ruined them. I don't know, obviously, what the problem was only that my father blamed my mother for it and she blamed herself too.

Their Catholicism didn't save the marriage, though they endured it for 14 years.

However, I do think the norm to get married around your 30's doesn't work for everyone either. I thought I would want 2 kids but now I've had some I wish I had more time to have a larger family, but don't particularly want to procreating in my very late 30's/early 40's, nor have university-aged children when I am in my 60's who may not settle down and have kids of their own until I am in my 70's if I even live that long. Pros and cons to all ways of living your life, I reckon..

So is it just PIV sex that is saved until marriage then?

PIV was the only thing that was considered 'sex' in my family -
also, it's not just religious people who marry young and for life, it's an option for anyone.

Crunchyfrog, I think all Christians do it differently. I know plenty who did no sexual contact whatsoever aside from kissing, some who did everything except PIV, have even heard on the grapevine of a couple who saved their first kiss until the wedding day.

I must be missing something, my reaction to that is just what for? What possible function does it serve?

Marrying young is usually a crap idea, particularly for women. Obviously there are exceptions, but if a young marriage lasts it's mainly down to luck - the two of you are both basically decent and open-minded people, prepared to grow and change and allow each other to do so. The problem with a lot of these early, superstition-based marriages is that they are all about controlling the woman and stopping her from developing into a full human being. A lot of these bullshit myth-peddlers are quite open about the fact that young women should be under male control and know their place, so they go straight from school to housework and breeding. Sooner or later she realises that there's more to life than having been passed like a parcel from parents to husband, she rebels and gets herself a life, and unless the husband is an exceptional sort of bloke, he gets binned. (Sometimes, unfortunately, not soon enough - if it's a particularly superstitious and sexist community, the woman won't escape without quite a bit of pyschological and probably physical battering.)

oh here we go - feminist on the loose.

solidgold Wow.

Okay, so the majority of my Christian friends believe that sex was designed to be enjoyed within marriage only and that by having sex with other people it means you're making it less special - and that the more people you have sex with, the more it becomes less about love and commitment etc and is emotionally damaging. Those who are more extreme about it (ie the no kissing until marriage thing, the people in the US you hear about who don't even hug or hold hands until marriage), seem to think that ANY physical contact should be purely reserved for your spouse because when you do it with others, it damages you emotionally, makes you less 'pure' and makes people less likely to want to marry you. To me, that's going way too far and sounds like a recipe for major hang-ups about sex and desire.

Ryccooler, are you saying that many Christian sects don't believe that the man is the head of the family and that the wife should submit to him?

What SGB said.

Hmm, I do wonder what happens if one of you loses your faith, say, 10 years in? Doesn't that make it all a bit tricky?

Seeker; Yes, of course religion is a form of control, and what's wrong with that? You're being controlled by the state every minute of the day. Religion is merely a set of rules in which it's followers live their lives by. Most religions do place men as head of the family but again that doesn't have to be a negative, although in most modern marriages men and women are seen as completely equal. Tony and Cherie Blair are Catholics - she's not exactly downtrodden is she.