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.

What I think is was different about the 1990s was that having children and not being married did carry a stigma in many (not all) places.

single mothers were being demonised by the government.

we got married in part because we decided to have kids early and we definitely both felt that to have kids you should be married.

pre marital sex generally wasn’t an issue but if the woman got pregnant and wasn’t married it became much more of an issue.

i remember reading advice books back then that suggested having sex before marriage because it was a bad idea to marry someone you were not sexually compatible with.

This! The 90s wasn’t that long ago!! People lived together, had sex before marriage, and the women had their own bank accounts! It was pretty much like now except the music was better and things were cheaper!

I genuinely think some people have misread the date in the OP!

It was in my community which was not some cult.
Of course, most young adults were having lots of premarital sex in late 1980s to the early 1990s but it was frowned on by the older generations and society. Especially if you were expected to get a Uni degree and a career before children. There were campaigns against teen pregnancy and abortion still had a stigma. Protesters were still allowed outside abortion clinics.

There was an expectation of being discreet and being on contraception was judged- you would get treated better if you said you were on the pill for acne or to treat heavy periods. Sexual health clinics were grim and dirty, you would be treated like a sex worker.

By 1992-1994 the AIDS crisis hit those of us in our 20s. 1 in 4 of us had HIV. It was a death sentence to get HIV then and AIDS was the #1 cause of death of young people aged 25-35. A woman is 17x more likely to catch HIV from an infected partner than a man because of the biology of a vagina vs a penis. Uni campuses were constantly putting out the message about how a drunken night out could give you a fatal dose of HIV. There was alot of unknowns on transmission that added to the general fear going round. It was found in saliva so water fountains were shut off or ripped out of schools, gyms, workplaces. Many jobs started requiring proof of HIV negative for employment- my Uni cafeteria job and civil service graduate internship both did. There was a study showing condoms did not fully protect against HIV so we were told there was no such thing as safe sex.

This crisis noticeably reduced the amount of casual sex by the mid1990s and increased the desire for those of us who were young then to have serial monogamous committed relationships where you got full STI checks - for HIV it was two tests, 3 months apart- to be sure you were not going to get HIV, then AIDS and be dead by 2005. Many of these were marriages.

My parents generation and older once they reluctantly accepted HIV was not a disease only affecting gay men and heroin addicts (homosexuality was still shameful in many areas) they were all like sniff sniff only sluts that have orgies with heroin addicts get HIV and serves you right. Loads of judgement.

I don't recognise the 90s people are describing. Sex before marriage and living together wasn't frowned upon!

It still is in some communities, I have one friend who bought a house with her DP when they got engaged but then didn't actually move in until they got married!

On divorce, my parents divorced in the late 1990s and my mum almost lost her job. She was one of the very first female vicars ordained and once the diocese and bishop were informed she was about to become a divorcee they convened to try and defrock her. She had to move back to her native US to work for an anglican (Episcopalian) female bishop in Maine in order stay an ordained priest.

My dad’s career took off.

I think as well a lot of this depends not only on the kind of community you part of but when in the 90s we are talking about. 1990/91 or 1998/99 they were different.

It really wasn't called living in sin in the 80's and 90's 😂 many people lived together in the 1980s onwards .

50s and 60s were quite different

Interestingly I see a start of a trend happening the other way with my DS and his friends (early 20s) of getting married mid 20s - so 24-26.

I spoke to him about it and there seems to be a number of reasons:
The biggest one is cost of housing and it's a lot cheaper as a couple to buy or rent your first home. Of course this doesn't need marriage but feels more "secure and grown up " with a marriage.
The horrors of online dating and difficulty of meeting / asking someone out in real life. The reduction in nightclubs where you might meet people, the HR risk of asking someone out or dating someone from work, social media and the fear of any rejection being plastered across social media etc.
Whereas university or college is one of the last places that young people can meet lots of people their age, freely and in a relatively relaxed environment.
A feeling that the "best ones" get taken early and the fear of leaving it too late.
The sense that the more people you date then the pickier you get to the point that the soul mate you are looking for doesn't actually exist. Whereas if you have dated the same person from say 20 then you grow to be each other's soul mates ( a more cynical view is that you don't know any better!).

I am most definitely not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing but just a simple observation of a recent behavioural change.

It was called living over the brush when I was growing up - late 80s/early 90s. Some people frowned on it and in general it wasn't as accepted as is today.

Agree the late 90s, casual sex before marriage went back up to late 80s levels in my experience because the AIDs crisis was solved although deaths continued for those the anti-virals came too late for. Stigma had declined on abortion. The high explosion of divorces amongst the baby boomers had young people starting to reject marriage as the impression became that it a) usually failed and then b) bankrupted you. Better measures had been put into place requiring CMS from unmarried fathers to mothers post split. Single motherhood was more accepted.

Exactly. It became legal for women to be able to open their own bank account or apply for a loan or credit card without needing a male signatory in 1975 – it was part of the Sex Discrimination Act legislation that passed that year.

Sex outside marriage was definitely the norm in the 90s, and was not considered unusual or shameful by wider society (though people from religious backgrounds may well have had different experiences). TBH, you'd have been considered unusual if you were in an adult relationship but waiting for marriage until you had sex.

I know! Out of my group 3/4 of us had careers, had our own homes, travelled, parties. It wasn’t just the Supernova Heights set having a good time…. although they were extreme!
My mum was always telling me how lucky I was and none of my group came from privilege.
The 80’s was a time when young women were thinking about careers as well as babies. Not everyone, but if you look back at cultural markers the ‘making it big’ feeling and social mobility were there.
If you can remember that far back, I can remember the ‘working girl’ aesthetic where you went to work in your suit and Reeboks, and then put your heels on when you got there.
Where do you think Sex and the City came from? They had all been living as single women in NYC since the late 80’s.
Friends? Yep, there were male characters but the girls all worked and had lots of romantic stuff going on.
I never really did the rave scene, but I went to a few, and if you thought there was no hedonism going on, I beg to differ.
It was the era when street drugs reached the masses - again, not for me - but I only had one friend like me who never had a go.
And all before camera phones or tracking on them so everyone was getting up to everything with no evidence. Great times - I miss them!

My grandmother got married and had a child at 17 in the 60s. My mum got married at 20 and had a child in the 80s. Both are still married to my grandad /dad. I'm now mid 40s with a grandmother only 37 years older than me.

I am absolutely intrigued as my mum had me ‘late’ at 29 and was called a geriatric mum. Her mum had her at 20.
Are you really close? I think it just be lovely to ask them about how things have changed.

My Grandad died in 1952 leaving my Grandma and three childdren
She must have had a bank account as she owned a shop?

Having children outside marriage was.

I've only read the first few pages but they are gold - women couldn't get a bank account in 1990 apparently! I was alive and compos mentis in the UK in the 90s but the fact that it was basically an Amish community without the funny clothes somehow passed me by.

In reality, the only people who went on about 'living in sin' were boring old duffers that nobody paid any attention to. And where I grew up wasn't exactly a progressive metropolis, so while I'm sure there were a few places in the Outer Hebrides or darkest Norfolk where these attitudes clung on as the norm, they certainly weren't that prevalent.

@PetulaGordeno
Where do you think Sex and the City came from? They had all been living as single women in NYC since the late 80’s.

That was set in NYC from 1998 onwards. 1998 run up to noughties hook up culture at the turn of Y2K was very different from peak aids crisis 1993.

I never understood it either and yes it gets said all time on here

I startrd my nurse traning in 1993
Loads of us were having casual sex and flings.

Not in my world.

I had my first baby in 1987. Of my four close mum friends, two were unmarried. One living with the father, one not. Neither mentioned any judgement on their families or friendship groups.

Its great that wasn't your experience. For a lot of us, it was.

It's not the case that, prior to 1975, women couldn't open a bank account - but banks could legally require a signature, permission or co-signature from a man (most often a family member) in order to set one up for her.

It was only after the 1975 legislation that a woman was legally entitled to open her own bank account just by herself, without needing that signature, permission or co-signature from a man.

Ok, but for me, both the number of people having casual sex and the frequency was much less in 1993 than it was in 1985-1991. You would have what? Just turned 18 in 1993? So would have not experienced the hedonism of the mid1980s to 1990.

So your perspective is of someone coming of age when we were going through a massive drop in casual sex and only seen it get more common as stigmas declined and AIDS became a nonissue. You never experienced what came before the AIDS epidemic.