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.

That would have gone down well with my mother, seeing as the two adult males were dead - should she have got permission from her 10 year old son?

you couldn't manage to lock a man down til your thirties

What a wildly misogynistic statement. Also strips women of agency and any choice as to who they wish to be with.

Why do you think a woman wishing to wait till her 30s till marriage was “unable to lock a man down”? Do women have no say and never say “no” to men they are not interested in?

Not wanting to be married yet does not mean you are not mature.

Some posters on this thread seem to think that the 1990's were the Dark Ages. 😂

I was a teenager/young adult during the 1990's and we were having plenty of sex before marriage :-) People lived together too, but among my friends that was more in the mid-late 1990's.

Having children before marriage, however, was far less common IME, marriage came first and children afterwards. I think that's one reason why the average marital age has increased, people often have their kids first now.

@Greenismyfavouritecolournow Eh? A quick search tells me that the school leaving age increased to 16 in 1972!

As for access to contraceptives, they were easily available and I lived in a rural area! I just went to my doctor and got on the Pill.

@Kimmielee Your comment that people got married to get out of their father's house and the lack of opportunities really made me laugh. It was FAR easier to move out of the family home in the 1990's than it is for 20-something's today. Most of us moved into shared houses or bedsits first and bought later. Living at home home with your parents was viewed as abit odd tbh. As for opportunities, after the early 1990's recession, the economy stabilized and then the EU borders opened up in 1995. It was a great time to be young - happy memories!

I think you're both mixing up your decades.

Lol, congratulations on completely missing the point, of course women can choose when and whether to get married, that's precisely why I find it so ridiculous that someone felt the need to start an entire thread questioning women who marry young simply because she couldn't imagine doing it herself but apparently we're all supposed to nod along when someone judges women for marrying in their early 20s while one snarky comment about not managing to find a husband until your 30s suddenly requires a lecture on female autonomy. Funny how that works.

@saraclara I think there is neurological research showing that brains are not fully cognitively developed until 25.

Not sure why that poster turned their response into a personal attack aimed at me. @JHound I wasn’t trying to ‘lock a man down’ in my 20s. I didn’t, and don’t, need to rush into anything.

This.

The thread isn’t criticising anyone. Why are you assuming that and being triggered?

I got married at 24 and it didn’t feel too young to me. I met my husband when I was 18 and I would have agreed to marry him a lot sooner but he wanted us to establish our careers and be able to afford a house first. We wanted children and in our families it’s not really seen as acceptable to do that without being married, so we couldn’t have waited much longer without being severely judged by some family members.

Exactly. The easiest thing a woman can find is a man 🤣 That poster is triggered.

Lol, calling someone "triggered" is what people resort to when they haven't got an actual comeback and you've done it twice now. Is that really all you've got? 😂 Also, it's 2 a.m. in the UK, perhaps it's time to put your phone down and go to bed.

My ‘comeback’ (also a juvenile term) was already stated above - not all women want to ‘lock down’ a man in their 20s. Some might never want to marry. Your comment is misogynistic.

Lol, in what universe is "comeback" a juvenile term? What, would you have preferred "rebuttal," "retort," "rejoinder," "riposte," or perhaps "counterargument"? Look, I'm perfectly happy to adjust my vocabulary if it'll make this conversation feel a little more intellectually stimulating for you and yes, I'm perfectly aware that not all women want to get married. Nobody ever suggested otherwise, the entire point was that women are free to make their own choices, including getting married at 23.

At which point I'd been married nearly 8 years and had three children. I suppose you could argue that as evidence. 😄

Yes, as was divorce, there was still great stigma attached.

Yeah, there is. And what the hell does that have to do with getting married in your early 20s? Lol, we expect 17-year-olds to choose a college, decide what degree to pursue, and potentially take on tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, but apparently a 23-year-old woman deciding to marry someone she loves is just too young to know what she's doing?

Quite, this thread is so strange!

I was in my early 20s in the 1990s. One friend got married at that stage, which seemed slightly wild to the rest of us, as we were so young. We are all living alone, with boyfriends or with friends.

There were absolutely NO raised eyebrows about living together in my friends, family or wider group. The majority of my social group had been to uni and were just cracking on with life.

The idea of no sex before marriage, living together being frowned upon... none of that bears any resemblance whatsoever to the average 20-something's life in the 1990's, in my experience.

I think the vast majority of young people were fine with it. But a lot of older people thought it was improper and at least wanted some plausible deniability, so living together or having a baby could extract a few tuts and head shakes.

The main reason Charles "had" to marry someone he barely knew and was far too old for was because of the idea he absolutely had to marry a virgin. That wasn't the 1990s but it was only a decade before.

Around 1995 I was mid 20s and living with someone, I had an older guy at work accuse me of "living in sin" in a very judgy way, but everyone else at the table scoffed and laughed at him.

My mother assumed I'd sleep with my boyfriends and didn't frown on it, though she was very concerned about pregnancy. My now DH's parents (think it was really just MiL who was bothered) put us in separate rooms whenever I stayed over, even though they knew we slept together at Uni. Once we got our own flat together they loosened up a bit but were very happy when we finally did get married.

We are early 40s and been together 21 years. Started having kids before 25. For some people it just works . I think some things pre Internet well social media was definitely simpler.

I got married in 1994 aged 26 - and most of my friends were similar. Uni then a job for a few years, then engaged/buy house/get married. Most people lived together before marriage as well. My mum married at 23 in 1966 but she had been at work since she was 14 so I guess you felt an adult much sooner but she went straight from living with parents to being married and living with my dad.

I think it was for financial reasons

Remember there being tax breaks for married couples and mortgage tax relief etc so it made sense to get married.

I think we were a lot more switched on to the fact that buying a place was a priority and getting a place with someone else was easier and quicker than trying to buy as a single person so we always had that almost subconsciously in the background.

I have lived all over the UK and in the 1990s no one batted an eyelid in most towns and cities over if you lived together or if you were divorced.
I only came cross 3 places where living together was seen as a terrible thing
They seemed to have very outdated and sometimes very strange views of relationships and a woman’s role

So I find it strange on this thread that posters thought that living together was some sort of huge deal to be frowned upon in the 1990s