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.

Lots of my age group got married at 17 or 18 often because they were pregnant. It was disgraceful to be an unmarried mother.

I got married at 22 because I was scared I'd be left unmarried - again frowned upon.

My sister got married in 1972 at 29 and my mother warned her she'd better "hurry up or people might think she was a lesbian" as she shared a flat with another girl.

All totally outdated and ridiculous notions. Thankfully times have changed.

The OP asked about 1990, not 1909! Of course a woman could have her own bank account and mortgage in 1990! We were even allowed out after dark on our own!

I was 20 in 1990 and I don’t recognise the OP’s scenario from my own life - one of my uni friends married just after we graduated but she was very much a minority. A work friend married at about 26 and again, hers was the first of our cohort. All of my other friends married late 20s to mid-30s, like me. We all lived with our partners before marrying. About a third of my school and uni friends didn’t marry at all but stayed living together.

No but I think living together still was.

I met my husband when I was 17, in the sixth form.
We married when I was 22. We have been through everything together, starting with nothing and building up to the life we have today. We are there for each other and everything we have we share. I know he would do anything for me and I can’t imagine being without him.

In my group, two were married by 25, foot of us not. The ones who got married had kids quickly, worked part time and took some time off the career ladder until school beckoned and they both caught up quickly. Both couples still married, kids are well grown and to looking them at 60-ish they are having great times.
Two us had children at 40 plus and are to require frank exhausted with some still teenage kids about with parents who need care.
The two of us who don’t have kids are okay but one of us really, really wanted kids but it never happened.
But out of a group of 6, four of us spent the 90’s having an absolute ball. Great times and we thought our friends who’d settled down were nuts.
Now? Not so much. Mortgages paid, married lovely guys, sorted.
However if I could go back I wouldn’t change it I wasn’t ready at all.

Don't be daft. I had my own bank account and mortgage before I married in the late '80s.

No, it really wasn’t. I’m from a solid middle class well educated context and it wasn’t frowned upon.

Most people did not go to university especially women. At 20 I had been at work for 5 years and been with my boyfriend for 3. There was no reason to wait any longer. I could not wait to leave the restrictions of home life where I was treated as a child.

The further you go back life expectancy was shorter, people aged comparatively more quickly, the expected healthy part of your life was shorter, women would have struggled with fertility earlier, infant mortality rates far higher, more likely to die in childbirth etc etc

Just many more legitimate and pressing reasons to "get on with it" than there are nowadays.

Ha ha getting married to get married. Let’s not forget the rave scene started in the late 80’s, and if can remember rightly it was our parents who’d had to get married due to pregnancy or to have sex.
The 90’s were absolutely wild. Obviously not me, but….

There was definitely stigma against single mothers

the child support act was passed in 1991 and the csa set up in 1993 largely because of concern about absent fathers who didn’t support their children and the single mothers on benefits as a result.

single mothers were demonised as the sole cause of all the problems the U.K. had at the time (much in the way immigrants are today).

pre marital sex wasn’t really an issue - everyone I knew had pre marital sex and as long as you didn’t rub people’s noses in it no-one cared.

single parenthood was definitely stigmatised though

It was certainly not universally approved of. My granny died in 1992 and an amazing number of my cousins 'began' living with a partner between her death in the spring and that Christmas.

The Sex Discrimination Act put paid to all the 'women can't get a mortgage' nonsense in 1975.

I got married at 21, he was 24 & we got divorced after 25 years. Everyone we knew was married by 25. I'm doing research into my family history - very working class & English - and nearly all the brides were pregnant on their wedding day. I've been quite surprised by that. And most of them married between 18 & 25, men and women. Those in their 30s often turned out to be widows or widowers.

Perhaps the difference was that your contemporaries were at university. In 1990 75% of school leavers didn't go to university. If you'd stayed in a small town/village, worked in the local industry, perhaps stayed at your parents home into your 20s things would have been different.

I was from a working class area in a small rural town. In the 1980s there would still have been many pursed lips at couples living together or having children before marriage.

This is a really interesting thread. Thanks @estrella167532839

I got married in 1991 aged 22. I had been living with my boyfriend- certainly wasn’t frowned upon at all then! He was in the Services and was being posted abroad, so we got married so that I could accompany him.

I will say that my parents lived together in 1973! But they had a very quick wedding, only 6 months after they met!!! I think it was due to the housing situation (it was complicated).

I remember in 1997 telling my parents that I wanted to move in with my then boyfriend and being frightened to do so!

We got married at 21 in the 1960s, we’re still together. Two children by 25, not considered a young mum. We’d left school at 15. I always had a bank account, we saved into the Trustee Savings Bank at school. I wouldn’t have got a mortgage or a bank loan in our early marriage. Women still had to leave some public sector jobs on marriage!

We weren’t grandparents until we were around 60, our DC took very different paths, educationally and careerwise before marrying or having children. I’m glad they did. Much less financial stress than we had, more opportunities and adventure before settling down.

I agree with this. I would say it started changing around the late 80s /1990. I had sex ed in the early 80s and it was very much “a mummy and a daddy who love each other very much and are married” but it was the tail end of that type of attitude and I feel like when I went to uni we were the generation that first had the idea that women should have as much fun as men (90s ladette stuff.) But I remember we had an American girl who was very promiscuous in our halls at uni and it made us feel uncomfortable.
The word slag (or tart) was very much still used and it wasn’t something you wanted a man to apply to you.
There has been an absolute sea change in attitude in a generation - but I personally would still not have wanted to be an “unmarried mother” and I have friends who felt the same. Vestiges of that still carried through to the early 2000s. You wanted the same name as your baby at those NHS appointments!

I think the financial thing is more that people didn't need or expect everything to be perfect, rather than that young people have less money.

Most of the weddings I went to were in church followed by a reception in community halls. My Dad wanted (and paid for) a "proper do", which meant the church where I went to Sunday School and 60 people for a sit down meal, no "party". My dress was more expensive than seems reasonable even now, but other than that it was very simple, cars were ones we had, driven by friends, a few flowers were done by me and mum, mum made two bridesmaids dresses. That it, there wasn't anything else to do.

Then we moved into a house that had no furniture except a mattress and some garden chairs lent by my parents (lent, not given!), with peeling wallpaper and an ancient fitted kitchen, that had only one ring working on the hob. We sorted it out over the 10 years that followed.

I think communication was actually better in those days. I've still got boxes of letters from my long-distance-relationship days as a student in the early 90s - pages and pages we used to write to each other and of course in those days you knew everyone's landline number off by heart.

If you arranged to meet up with someone, it was taken for granted you would turn up and be on time. You couldn't flake at the last minute without it being complicated - once, I had arranged to meet a friend by train who was ill at the last minute - she had to phone the railway station and they tannoyed me to go to customer services to give me her message!

What utter nonsense! I was at uni in the mid 90s and by 3rd year most relationships had moved in together. Back in my home town it was the same, I don't recall I single frown - and can remember that wonderful decade very clearly

To have sex!

Not that long ago it was frowned upon to live together/have sex if not engaged. My mother was 21 when she got married, I'm pretty sure she refused to have sex without a ring on her finger. that was the early 70s.

Lots of my friends met their partners at university or polytechnic and married within a couple of years of finishing. It was the usual thing then to marry rather than live together. Also, people got engaged sooner, usually within one to two years, and then got married within a year after that. Weddings were held at one of your local churches, and the reception at a local big hotel. In one season, you could go to several weddings at the same church or hotel. No one thought anything of it.

Id say now is technically stranger. You meet people and you find someone you like, you marry them. Much harder to meet people pre internet!

It was in my family. I grew up in a lower middle class background/very proud working class type of background, in a very Catholic family and wonder circle. People wouldn't openly comment to the couple but there was still a lot of judginess and comments behind their back rather than it being seen as absolutely indecent or anything like that.

I moved in with my then boyfriend in 1999 and I had a few raised eyebrows that marriage wasn't at least in the pipeline.