do you know anyone who got married very young nowadays

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I recently found out a distant relative (who is now dead) got married when she was just 18 and her DH was also 18. This was a very long time ago and I know times were different but when I look at my DS who is 17 and although he’s a lovely lad the idea of him getting married next year seems beyond ridiculous. So I wondered does anyone know anyone who got married at a very young age (18/19/20) recently as in since 2010. How did it work out? Did they stay together? How did they manage finances ect?

This this is more common in religious circles

@Xenia

Marrying young (as long as you work / have a good education) can mean you are more likely to buy a house - no gap years, pointless masters, sitting around at home etc etc just getting on with life. No 10 years of nightclubs with loads of money spent on going out. Just family foundation etc. In our family the following things have helped.

1. Buy a first property before you breed
2. Buy with 2 full time professional salaries (so choose a spouse and your own career wisely) before the babies come.
3. Marry (and before babies come) - marriage tends to mean people stay together longer. I am glad my daughters both qualified as lawyers, bought a property , married and then had babies (as did I).
4. Get on with life. I graduated a at 20 a year young as I was a year young through secondary school. I chose law so that avoids doing a post degree law conversion so I did not "waste" another year studying on that. I did not have any gap years nor maternity leaves so not surprisingly my earnings have never dropped and I work full time and always have. However those are just my choices. Plenty of people from all kinds of cultures in the UK who marry young do things in many different ways - neither right nor wrong, just different.

Also I do think at university you get the chance to meet a lot of good suitable similar people and it may be easier to find a future husband there than once you are working. My parents met there in effect. I did - during my post grad. My son met his girl friend there - they are not engaged yet but we shall see.... they are still students.

On living with parents in London - I live in outer London and my lawyer daughters could live her for post grad studies and to some extent when doing 2 years training/first job and two of my sons are doing the same now who are students - it has definitely helped that I live here rather than moving to remote Northumberland (I am from NE England) once they left school.

If only we could all be so perfect...

[quote onlychildhamster]@SoberSerena my DH's childhood room was a box room! MIL's was a typical 3 bed Victorian terrace (2 double bedrooms and box room). we stayed in a reception room.

Traditionally, thats what people did in the past when they married young. But marrying young doesn't mean that you have to stop working or have kids immediately. You can pursue whatever aspirations you have, you just have to do it together.[/quote]
Sorry, what point are you trying to make here? Do you think your in laws owning a 3 bed house in London where they allowed you to live is the norm or that you were somehow slumming it? Have you seen the accommodation people have to live in when renting in London? Genuinely have no idea if you're honestly that ignorant or if you're joking

I got married in 2010 at 21. 3 kids later we split in 2020.

@SoberSerena yes I am still in London. we bought a flat very near MIL's home. In a sense, we haven't done worse than her even though she bought in the 1980s and 1990s. She too bought a flat when she was our age. Couldn't upgrade for ages until the property prices crashed.

My colleagues who are married all own their homes (though mostly not in London). But my colleague's 4 bed house in Kent is the same price as my flat so I guess its a matter of preference too! Single people struggle much more, but I don't think it has ever been easy for single people to buy their own homes; in the previous generation, lots of single people who bought their own flats had lodgers (including my MD who said he almost always had a lodger until he married).

DH is much better paid and practically all his colleagues own their homes, married or not. the only guy who doesn't own his home is someone in excess of 100k but is single and wants to buy in zone 1 (so would rather wait until he is coupled up with someon ewho earns similar).

Surely the fact buying a house is out of reach for youngsters is a massive contributor as to why people don't settle down young- they literally can't!

I didn’t realise home ownership was mandatory before getting married. It never used to be, when did that change?

I got married in 1989 when I was 21. That was the norm then. It lasted 17 years but I have plenty of friends who married around the same time who are still together

@onlychildhamster, could you kindly stop tagging me? It sends me an email every time you do it and it's a little irritating. As you can see, I am responding to you on here, so there really is no need.

I am no more perfect than anyone else and I expect one reason I married at 21 was because I wanted a lot of children so wanted to get started younger and also religious reasons - Catholicism in the 1980s - still then not that common to have multiple partners before marriage.

My advice to people to do assortive mating with someone of similar exams and career, to buy a first property before you marry and have children etc is not wrong. It is not showing off. My father's father was 49 when he was born. My parents were married for nearly 10 years before having children from 1953 as they needed two full time professional salaries to buy their house before we children came.

It basically works to pick someone with a similar high income to yours, professional qualifications (which is why Indian matchmakers will even put seeks MAB, or seeks doctor etc on the profiles) and it is easier to buy a house with 2 full time salaries before babies come than when there are huge childcare costs or a whole salary given up.

Welll there are many Londoners who grew up here and yes many of them would have parents who already own property (whether its a 2 bed ex council flat or a mansion). I didn't grow up in London but married someone who did. I wouldn't say its the norm but not uncommon. And there are plenty of London suburbs which were unfashionable in the 1990s and accessible to people of modest means, it means that many people of DH's age (late 20s and early 30s) grew up in houses with 3+ bedrooms which means living with parents is an option.

My DH had a colleague who was a very strict Muslim and was well on her way to buying a place in East London with her husband without a mortgage. She stayed with her parents and 4 sisters while saving. I think she was from quite a poor background actually.

A couple from my school got together at 13, married at 18 and have recently celebrated their 40th anniversary. They are still completely in love and now have about 8 grandchildren.

More recently a girl at my DCs school got married at 17. Her husband was 19. They are very religious (C of E) and don't approve of living or sleeping together before marriage.

@onlychildhamster

Welll there are many Londoners who grew up here and yes many of them would have parents who already own property (whether its a 2 bed ex council flat or a mansion). I didn't grow up in London but married someone who did. I wouldn't say its the norm but not uncommon. And there are plenty of London suburbs which were unfashionable in the 1990s and accessible to people of modest means, it means that many people of DH's age (late 20s and early 30s) grew up in houses with 3+ bedrooms which means living with parents is an option.

My DH had a colleague who was a very strict Muslim and was well on her way to buying a place in East London with her husband without a mortgage. She stayed with her parents and 4 sisters while saving. I think she was from quite a poor background actually.

Well, at least we agree (got there in the end)! It isn't the norm and your mil was lucky to be able to buy (and she was also savvy enough to buy) when when did. Which was lucky for you.

In your specific set of circumstances, you being married made it easier to move in with in laws who felt that you being married meant they ought to house you despite being grown adults and they had the sofa free for you to sleep on. It does not follow that generally for young people getting married will lead to a free / cheap place to stay in their city of choice while they save for their own property. So as I already said, I do not agree that, generally speaking, being married would make buying a home easier.

Being part of a couple though, definitely does, as you only need a one bed but can have two salaries to pay for it.

I know 3 couples who married young (between 20 and 25) and they all fell into the starter marriage category. Split without children and went to marry again and have a family with second spouse. Religion (in the sense of not wanting to have sex before marriage) was the driver for the majority I think. I don't know or know of anyone who married as a teen though.

My ex's brother and his gf got married 18 years ago aged about 20/21 just after graduating, they just didn't see any point in waiting. Not religious. They have six kids now, are still together and very happy as far as I know.

Equally I know plenty of people who married in their early twenties and then got divorced a few years later.

I am 40 and got married last year. However we've been together since I was 21 and he was 18. Started living together after about a year. Have 9 yo dd.

@Grinling

Although in a sense, while there’s obviously no point volunteering that your parents married at eighteen in 1970, I’m not sure there’s a lot of point in saying you know someone who married at 18 in 2020 either, because it’s just to soon to gauge whether it will last and/or be happy (not necessarily the same thing) — assuming the OP is, as her post suggests, interested in the longevity of early marriages.

Exactly. I don't know why several people are 'fewmin,' and getting so agitated about people mentioning (for example,) grandparents getting married at 17 in 1970 and are still together after 50 years, as plenty of people have mentioned more recent marriages too (from 2000-2005.) And 2002 wasn't 'a completely different world then,' as someone said further back. It was only 20 years ago.

I personally mentioned couples who married 20-25 years ago, at 19-23 and are still together, and also that their adult DC got married at 20-ish too, (in the past 3 to 8 years,) and had a baby by 21/22, and I said it's nice that the babies have young-ish grandparents. So I mentioned various couples from various timelines including ones who have got married fairly recently.

As the pp said there how can you possibly gauge how successful a marriage (where the couple were very young) is going to be - or if it's a success - if it's very recent? Not enough time as passed to be able to tell yet! So of COURSE^ people are going to refer to couples who married young 15-25 years ago or more.

*not enough time HAS passed!!!

I got married in 2002, I was 22 years old. Still married and happy, we have 2 children

A friend of mine got married at 19 and they're still together with two lovely children.

I got engaged at 21 and my husband was 23. We've been together 15 years in total. I think there's a good amount of luck involved- we just so happen to have grown together rather than apart.

And 2002 wasn't 'a completely different world then,' as someone said further back. It was only 20 years ago.

Are you kidding?

You may as well say 1930s Britain was the same as 1950s.

And 1950s was the same as 1970s.

Of course there were massive economic and societal changes between those times in terms of economics, womens place in the world, wars and recessions, economics, development of the pill etc. all of which massively affected relationships.

I get that it might seem to you like nothing has changed since 2000 because you've lived through it and the changes have been gradual, but there have been huge economic changes since then, which affect relationships and lives: house prices, massive recession, inflation, brexit, pandemic, social media, technology, online dating, womens equality.

That's why OP is asking about people getting married young right now!

I know an 18 year old who got married last year. Very traditional, religious family and so they needed to for the sex. I do hope it works out

@AgileSlug

I know an 18 year old who got married last year. Very traditional, religious family and so they needed to for the sex. I do hope it works out

Well, that makes total sense within that family/religious mindset, but I remain fascinated by those who marry young without that to give a 'rationale'.

I got married at 22 in 2013. Family and friends thought it was great, strangers said it was too young. Still married!

I was 20 when I got married, and all my friends were also young. Every single husband cheated. Only one couple survived, and that's because she chose to forgive a long affair. The rest of us walked after the cheating was exposed. For me, it was 16 years in before I discovered the (long standing) cheating, and I left 4 years later.

I think women can marry young, and stay in it for the long haul, but I just don't think men can hack it - I think they get to early 30's and realise they haven't sowed their wild oats, and it all goes downhill from there.

I got married at 16.
We have been married for 24 years now and genuinely still adore each other.
I had already had a (very much unplanned) ds, and we have had 5 more along the way.
I feel very lucky.