To wonder why people used to marry so young

[estrella167532839]

In 1990 the average age for getting married was 24. I know couples who got married when they were 21/22 and had only just graduated from uni. I can’t imagine being married that young.

At the moment, it seems like most people get married in their 30s, if at all.

It depends on your background.

I was a teen in the 90s and my parents (religious) were incredibly judgemental of anyone living together outside marriage in that era. They were also homophobic. Happily, like the country as a whole, their attitudes are fundamentally different today.

(I lived in sin with my now DH for 7 years before we got married 😅 in the late 2000s/2010s).

I remember even Mizz being quite raunchy as a kid/preteen in the late 90s 🤣

Really? I can't be bothered verifying but I've heard the opposite, that living together before marriage is correlated with higher divorce later. It's also possible that it was true at one time and the situation has changed now.

Oh it was.

My sibling and two other friends I can think of instantly got married younger than that in the 1990s. I had no idea why they would get married at such young ages, but I was a teen lone parent so I wasn’t in a position to comment really. I have never married.

I understand you probably don’t mean it the way it sounds, but a phone is not a luxury product for today’s first time buyers.

You can’t access your bank without it. You can’t make a doctor’s appointment without it. You can’t park your bloody car without it.

Please think before you type.

but living together as a couple was still a thinf remarked upon

No it wasn’t.

Not where I lived or my mum she had me as a teenager and had to get married before I was born, not everyone had a free and easy life in the 60s early 70s.

Luckily I didnt say women couldnt have bank accounts?

I said it was common for most high street banks to ask for the father's or husbands permission to open one because banks could exercise discretion on thier customers.

That doesnt mean all banks did this or that no women had accounts. It means it was a very common experience for many women to have to get permission.

My mum had an account her dad gave permission. It was very common.

My Mum told me I'd be "left on the shelf" (an old maid) when I was only 17! Incidentally, I got married last week for the first time - Im 70!

Not to mention the Cosmopolitan in the 70's.

Religious people are different.

Cohabitation rates were 2.9% in NI in the early 1990s so it quite clearly wasn’t commonplace.

Living together was ok in the 90s. You are thinking of the 60s. I married while at university so was only 20. Actually a bad decision as it turned out but I was married for 24 years and have two wonderful DC. What I think is that far more people were aware that marriage is a legal contract that gives lots of rights (and duties) which take a long time (and money) to sort out it you don't get married. That marriage is a legal contract rather than a big do and a party seems to have escaped people lately.

I got married in 1990 aged 21, my husband, who's actually still my husband, was 22. Neither of us had just graduated because neither of us were at, or intended to go to, university. We lived together for six months before we tied the knot. I don't remember anything about it being frowned upon.

Why? Because we wanted to. I mean we loved each other, still love each other, and we were realists. We didn't have this idea that we would independently sort out our life and future and then meet someone else who had also entirely independently sorted out their life and future. Where's the fun in that? We wanted to do it together. And we knew it would be a bit up and down / thick and thin, etc. But I would say that we'd both been working since the age of 16 and we'd both already left home by the time we were 18 and weren't dependent on parents or anything. Like, we'd been adulting for a while, doing the 9-5, paying all our own bills, etc.

Anyway, yeah, we made it. We did go to university in the end. He was at it for a long time, got a PhD, became a lecturer and I'm a teacher.

Now we're both approaching 60, it's funny looking at our shared past that doesn't involve any other partners. The marriage is sort of baggage free in that respect.

The comments show how different areas had different norms. None of my group of friends lived with their husband/wife to be before getting married. Some of us were in house shares if we worked a fair distance from our homes. This was mid 80s in a very rural area where couples just didn’t live together pre marriage. The ones who didn’t go to uni got married in their early 20s and those of us who did go to uni married a few years later, mid to late 20s. We were all on the housing ladder before hitting 30 and as most of us are still together, we managed to be mortgage free before our mid 50s.

The Two of Us was a sitcom starring Nicholas Lyndhurst and Janet Dibley that ran between 1986 and 1990. The whole premise of it was that they were cohabiting and that situation was fairly scandalous at the time. I don't remember much else about it, but apparently the finale of it was them marrying.

Anyway, I remember lots of couples living together in the 1990s. Even my parents, Church of Scotland stalwarts (mentioned by another poster earlier), were kind of neutral about it, thinking it was not a bad idea to really get to know someone before marrying them.

I now understand why it was common for women to marry in their teens and early twenties - it was so they could have babies who would become teenagers before the menopause hits so you don't have teenage and menopausal hormones clashing at the same time!

Congratulations! 🍾

Living ‘in sin’ only really became acceptable in the 90’s . People got married young because they wanted to have sex/live together. A large amount of women weren’t aiming for a career, they were getting married and having kids.
I got married at 23 in late nineties. I was the first to get married in my friendship group but we were all married by 26.

I had teenagers, a toddler and perimenopause symptoms. It was a rough period!

People living longer, less jobs for 16 year olds, everything bei g so expensive that young adults are dependent on parents for much longer. Whole host of reasons! Silly comment really.

Yup

The other thing is, a hell of a lot of people of my parents generation got married young because they'd got knocked up - my own mother being one of them. But that was more the 50s and 60s.