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.

Im 53 and my parens wouldnt have allowed me to share a bed with a boyfriend
Even when my sister was engaged and living with her now ex husband they had seperate bedrooms at my parents one xmas to avoid offending our grandparents
Although ironically both mum and Grandma were pregnant on their wedding day 🙄

Society isn't made up of people who have the same ideas as me now and there will always be people who have a conservative attitude. The 1990s was very liberal though, more so than now in a lot of ways.

And yes older people did have more conservative views but younger people just ignored them and did their own thing, same as they do now. People were hardly not going to avoid having sex out of wedlock and get married instead just because great aunt Mildred disapproved

No, pinck, I think you've missed the point. It's the sheer ugliness of the words "locking a man down" . God almighty. I pity your husband.

My parents lived together for a while before they were married, that was in 1970.

One of my uncles had the classic 'shotgun wedding' around the same time because he got his girlfriend 'up the duff'. The marriage ended acrimoniously within 10 years, he always believed she had trapped him into marrying her.

Pinck is objectionable on every thread they post on from what I’ve seen . They don’t seem to be a very happy person.

‘Being allowed to have sex’? Ha ha ha ha.

Both my grandmothers had to get married. In the 1920s, people will always find a way… regardless what is or isn’t ‘allowed’.

Ultimately people were having sex outwith marriage since the year dot. As far as leaving marriage until later in life thats a personal choice for both sexes. It can come at a price though when fertility declines & the not for me until well into 30s brigade are queueing up at fertility clinics.

Depends on where you were, and remember 90s there were a lot more church families.

Just the same as certain religious groups are still very no sex before marriage

I don’t know because living together was perfectly normal in the 1990s.

Perhaps it’s down to women realising they don’t have to marry (and men seeing that being married isn’t really to their advantage) so people are putting off marriage or not bothering at all.

My mum and Dad had a shot gun wedding in 1971
They wwre both 29 and came from catholic families so it was seen as the " done thing"
They were together for 54 years before my mum died last year.

My mum and dad got married in 1970s in their late 20s. I got married straight after graduation in 2005. I was probably a bit younger than most of my friends but not massively so.

This is similar to my folks married late 60s, lived with parents for a year until they got a council house, in a multi not exactly great.

Weren't able to get a mortgage

No religious background in my family - nominal CofE at most - but my uncle's wife came of a Methodist background so unmarried pregnancy was definitely a no-no in the early 70s for them.

My parents have always atheists as far as I know, they married in a register office. I understand what finally brought about the marriage was that my dad had to relocate for work and if they were married his relocation allowance would cover his wife as well 😆I don't know if they would have made a point of marrying before starting a family - my sister and I were planned pregnancies, so possibly they would if only for adminstrative/legal convenience.

@DeftGoldHedgehog Oh society was certainly different, I'm not denying that. But it wasn't as restrictive as some posters seem to think and I grew up in a rural area.

My mum and dad were 18 and 19 when they got married in 1978 - she was pregnant with me which speeded the process up somewhat! But they are now in their sixties, still together and still happy, so there you go.

No! I think some of the posters suggesting this possibly weren't even born then, or maybe lived in Amish communities. It was perfectly acceptable and actually the norm to live together in the 80's and 90's. Nobody would've given it a second thought. And everyone had been freely shagging everyone (same as today) since the 70's. I know, I was there.

One of my college friends married during her final year of teacher training, so that she could go out to Cyprus as her NCO husband's spouse as soon as she left college, rather than living together for a while first.
I don't know if this was a regulation for living in married quarters in those days, but military society seemed to be more "conventional", at least on the surface.

I think people used to marry young for multiple reasons.

• Fathers were often authoritarian figures who would treat daughters like a child even when they were adults. Women were often keen to move out and gain independence. There wasn’t usually the option of living at home rent free, if you were earning you were expected to hand over the majority of your wages to your parents. We were keener to ‘escape’ the family home!
• It was easier to afford to live independently as a young adult.
• We were socially conditioned to believe the Disney dream of meeting your Prince and settling down. We thought that we ‘needed’ a man, and meeting one and marrying him was ‘success’.
• We were similarly socially conditioned to have children in our 20s, and told that waiting until our 30s was foolish because we’d be ‘barren’ and ‘on the shelf’ by 30!

Honestly, in the 1980s and 1990s getting married was just what we did. There were some tax breaks and it made life easier for mortgages if you were married. I also think that we expected less in terms of materialism and our homes were largely furnished with the cast offs from the homes of mum and dad.

We didn't expect to have fabulous careers from the get-go, very few people went to university, a lot went to work at 16 and a lot did post school technical training and went to work at 17/18/19. By the time we all reached our early 20s we were working and beginning to climb the career ladder. So at 21/22 we'd been working for between 3-6 years and probably well into our second or third jobs by then.

I also think that there was less disparity by getting together younger. A lot of couples, like us, started with nothing and built everything together. These days, by getting married later everyone is comparing monetary wealth and assets and ensuring bills are split evenly, etc.

Weddings were also not the ridiculous affairs they are today. Receptions were pub function rooms or town halls, or even just a sit down wedding breakfast at a restaurant, ceremony was church or registry office, those were the options.

I don't honestly think anyone "got married to have sex" and certainly in my circle no one would have batted an eyelid at people living together even without marriage on the horizon. We had family planning clinics, didn't need to be married to go on the pill, condoms were free and this was early 1980s and totally nonjudgmental.

I grew up in London so I can only talk about London standards but my parents thought we should live together first and my grandmother also didn't bat an eyelid and she was born in 1903.

Basically, getting married was a commitment that we all embraced. It was the next step followed by children. However, in those days you couldn't get maternity leave until you'd been working somewhere for 2 years so everything had to be timed cleverly for maximum benefits.

I do agree that single parent families were not the norm and I do know the more than one couple who "had to get married" but it seldom seemed to work out well. I also remember one girl, bless her, whose mother would not let her go on the pill and she had at least three abortions that I knew of before she was 18 so, yes, some parents had principles that were stupid in the extreme.

For those posters who weren't born in the 1990s or are too young to remember them, here's a nostalgic picture of me and my best mate at a typical 1990s party 😉😁

I can well imagine the few who became students would have a totally different experience to those who left school and straight into a job.

And that goes for all generations the 1990 thousands of young people worked in YTS schemes for very little £29 a week, if you want the inflation calculation on that £76 a week. No minimum wage going on there

😂😂
The 90s were a blast.

😂😂😂

I think a lot of posters have provided great insight as to the “why”, however I am unsure about the unspoken implication that marrying younger is inherently unwise or odd.

From my experience as someone who got married 5 years ago at the age of 24, to my DH of the same age, we got a lot of questions and weird looks from some acquaintances and friwnds we weren’t as close to, about why two Oxbridge grads would choose to do this so young. It definitely wasn’t the done thing in our circle and a fair few people assumed I was pregnant.

In reality we just knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together and we wanted to take that extra commitment on early, as marriage matters to us but I can see why others would feel differently if marriage is maybe not seen as important to them. It was fun having a wedding at that age and starting our life together! We did have our DD a year afterwards and I think that was even more surprising for people from our friendship circle, the majority were at that point at least a decade away from having kids. I don’t think the latter is a bad decision, it all depends on your circumstances, but I did find it annoying that it was automatically assumed that what we were doing was so odd!