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.

I think you need to repeat that to deftgoldhedgehog who's gone off the deep end 😂

I'm a woman of 65; I got my first current bank account in 1979 as a single lady aged 18. I also started living with my now-husband in early 1981. So, it goes waaaay back before the 1990s 😎

I got married at 23 in the early noughties. It was a marriage expedited a little by visa issues but I never felt too young and nobody expressed any surprise. We had lived together for a year and we were busy building our careers. It felt like a reasonable next step and we are still together 25 yrs later.

Actually, quite a lot of friends got married soon after that, so I don't think I was that ahead of the curve.

We bought a house the same year and managed to accrue a decent amount of equity before the crash.

i’m 52 and I got married at 21 still happily married .
most of my friends got married in there 30’s . It felt right and we we wanted to do it , I could never imagine my eldest who’s 20 getting married at my age though

In my world, you were expected to. Living together was deemed as 'living in sin' and unmarried mothers were shunned. Older single women were 'spinsters' which was code for undesirable. Thank goodness things have changed.

Oh and to add we lived together since I was 18 , it was nothing about sex before marriage . I has lots of sexual experience before I met dh . We had been married 10 years before 1st ds and 20 years when 2nd ds came along

This thread is bonkers! I graduated aged 21 in 1991. Everyone was having sex before marriage and loads of people were living together! I can think of a couple of friends who got married in their mid 20s but most late 20s / 30s. Quite a few who’d met at Uni lived together afterwards to make sure they could survive in the ‘real world’ before they got married and some had children out of marriage. 😱.

I disagree. I think the 90s was more liberal in many ways. We certainly didn't pigeon hole people like we do now into 'good' and 'bad'.

@Additup I agree with this. Listening to differing viewpoints was more acceptable then, discussing topics without shutting people down/cancelling them. Mind you, we were in the midst of big social changes with the 1995 Schenegen Agreement, opening up Europe really changed societies. I thought it was an exciting time.

Everyone in your circles maybe but not everyone's circles.

I know a fair few couples who didn't live together before marriage. A few i know were virgins on their wedding night, others im not so sure about

I was living with my partner of the time, at around 20 in the late 80's. It wasn't at all frowned on generally, but funnily enough I do remember that if we tried to book into a small hotel or b&b we would sometimes say we were Mr & Mrs according to the vibe it gave off!
Even back in the 80's if you were in a 2 bed place sharing with someone of the opposite sex you had to jump through hoops to show you weren't a couple if you claimed Housing Benefit - so that shows in the 80's couples living together rather than being married was not in the least unusual.

I was brought up in a very traditional northern working class mill town (ie not very progressive/liberal) and I completely agree with you but it appears some people were brought up in a parallel universe.

Maybe the difference is I was also brought up without a strong religion to shame me into celibacy before marriage?