AIBU to feel shocked my 23-year-old daughter is marrying?

[SlothsRUs]

My 23 year old daughter has just announced that she is getting married next year.

I am completely shocked.

Surely it’s not normal anymore to marry that early.

I tried to be joyous and congratulate her but would you be happy?

I want to know why she wants to marry this young.

I know she is an adult and what she does is nothing to do with me but I am really shocked.

I’ve noticed this too and found it surprising. I have a few friends whose children are getting engaged at this sort of age.

It’s great! Your job as a parent is to raise an adult. At 23, she is now an adult, ready to commit to her long-term partner. Well done!

I agree with you OP. I got married at 25, which was very young in my circle. My mother was concerned and it turned out she was right to be. I think that while she is an adult she is still very young but there’s not much you can do about it.

What's the issue? It's the younger side of average, but a perfectly normal age. We were both 22 (although, granted, that was at the end of the previous millennium!) - 27 years and still going.

I can understand it maybe being a bit younger than you would have guessed, but 'shocked' is quite a stretch. Do you not like/trust her fiance (although you say he's a nice guy); or do you not trust her to know her own mind?

Tough one. I got married at 23 and it didn’t work out. My standards were low and it’s ruined my life tbh. If it’s the right person then I’m sure there’s lots of success stories. I don’t think you’re being unreasonable though, I certainly wouldn’t want my kids to make the same mistake. Hindsight is a wonderful thing

I think it's great, and would be delighted if it was one of mine.

I got married at 21, still married 30+ years later. Most of my friends and relatives got married in their 30s, many are now divorced. We feel like the fact that we met young meant we had time to figure things out in our relationship while we were still growing up and getting formed, some of our friends were so set in their ways by the time they got married, and then had the pressure of the biological clock meaning they had to have dc very soon after, that it was much harder for them to make it work.

Why is it young to make a big commitment? How is the commitment any bigger than it was when your mother got married? If anything the commitment was bigger than as more women had fewer choices if things went wrong.

I was 23 when I was engaged, married at 24, first baby at 25.

Ten years in, we are still together, I have an amazing career, nice house, nice life, holidays, travel etc. We’d only been together less than a year when we got engaged as well.

Thank god my mum was supportive and wasn’t like you. We didn’t have one negative comment actually.

No point waiting just for the sake of it. Being single/dating in your thirties and forties is not an enviable or desirable thing….

She's 7 years past the age of consent for sex.

She could have been driving for 7 years.

If she were so inclined to join the military, she would have been able to go into combat 5 years ago.

She's got less than 20 years of fertile time (if she wants children).

She is 2 years past uni graduation age.

If she's old enough for sex, to drive, fight for her country, have graduated from uni with both an under graduate degree and an MA, why is she too young for marriage?

23 isn't too young for marriage. We're just used to society infantalising their adult children and delaying adulthood, leading to failure to launch, with people rushing to cram everything into the 35-40ish age window, and then wondering why they find it harder to get pregnant.

I mean, unless she's declared that she'll quit work on marriage and become a trad wife and giving up her freedom to her man, I don't honestly see the issue. She found a good one early, why not keep him? Why date for a decade only to complain he now sees no reason to get married? Or teach the point of rushing a wedding because they want kids?
Marry young, enjoy life together, grow and change together. Better than a succession of arsed breaking her hesrt

That may be true, but it’s not a good thing! I find the trend for people in their 20s to still be living at home, entirely dependent on their parents, much more worrying.

I married at 23, DH 25. 38 years married.
My son will get engaged this year at 27 and three of his school chums are getting married this year. All graduates, all earning £50k plus.
Good men are hard to find. Make sure she has her own money.

Couldn't agree more. We actively encourage failure to launch these days. And then wonder why they struggle.

Married at 22, just due to celebrate 51 years of blissful marriage

I worked with someone who got married at 16. Still happily married 60 years later. Secretly, I thought her marriage lasted as she had married in her Sunday best!!! She couldn’t afford a wedding dress or a big wedding. The marriage was what was important to them.

It's a bit young nowadays as "the norm" but she's a fully grown adult and she's been with him for 2.5years, he's a nice guy, be happy for her!

Mumnet posters find it shocking if anyone has a baby start a family or get married in their 20s.

Only on mumsnet do I read all the above being done past 38 or 40.

Young people are so infantalised these days. Bonkers that it seems more accepted to be unemployed and living at your parents house at 25 than married with children of your own.

The tide is turning against late marriage and leaving trying for babies late.

The aging grandparents needing care while they were still at college / uni seeing their parents torn in half between the young and elder generation.

The next generation have seen it and don’t want it.

23 is a perfectly good age to marry if they plan to be married for a few years before trying for babies.

Rather that than a rushed 35 year old marriage because the clock is ticking.

I don’t see why it’s too young. We got married at 24, had our first mortgage before that, had our first baby at 25. We weren’t the first of our friends to get married, most of our other friends got married within a year or two after we did.

Yanbu OP, it's highly unusual. And highly unusual things tend to shock us.

Only half of 24 year olds have left home, and the average age to leave your parents home in the uk is now 24 - 28

The average age for a woman in the uk to get married for the first time is 31.5

It used to be a lot younger, so all the people saying 'it worked out great for me 20 / 30 / 40 years ago' were doing what everyone did at the time, and what was expected in some cases.

Unless she is very religious I think I would be worried particularly if it's her first serious relationship. Not that this means it won't work out, but when I look back on what I was like at that age and what my friends were like, we all changed a lot over that time (early 20s to 30) and none of us ended up with the people we were in serious relationships with at the time.

I’m in my mid-40s and that would have been very young even when I was that age. (Even though my parents married when they were 21 and my mother was a mother-of-two at 23!).

I would be shocked if my children decided to marry young too - but if she’s excited and you like him, try and be happy for her. Plenty of people stay together throughout their lives happily.

I used to work with someone who’d got married at 19. She always insisted she hadn’t married too young and they seemed happy enough but years down the line I heard he’d gone off with a younger woman.

I think there will be a correction against the extremely late first marriages of the millenial/younger generation. 23 is the younger side of the normal range to get married. It's nice, it means they will have a few years to be young and in love and newly married, before they have to think about kids etc. It's a lot better than panic marrying the next okish man you meet at 38, then quickly having to have kids with someone you don't really know that well (and then splitting up...)

Loads of my friends are still with the same people they were with at 23 and we are all in our late 40s. It doesn't seem very shocking.