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.

Pre marital sex wasn’t generally any sort of taboo in the 90s!

Before The Pill was easily available, I dare say people did often marry earlier. Even an unplanned pregnancy wouldn’t be a problem for your more ‘proper’ relations, as long as you had tied the knot.

And not everybody trusted men to bother with condoms, or to use them correctly. They weren’t easily available everywhere like they are now, either.

"In 1990 the average age for getting married was 24."

Back in 1990 I was 25 so I guess that I'm pretty much this demographic (although I didn't get married myself until 28).

Other posters have mentioned that one reason to get married in the 1980s/90s was to have sex. No, not at all. There was plenty of sex being had by lots of people with no thoughts of getting married at all.

One thing that is very different from today though is that people left school much earlier than they do today. I think it was around 60% of people left school at age 16 back then.

If you've been working since the age of 16 then you're probably more likely to be in a situation where you want to settle down with somebody nine years later.

Only 19% went to uni in 1990. 1 in 5. So the other 80% were working. By 24 they had probably been working ft for 8 years.
Society was more conservative. Living together wasn’t as acceptable. People would probably be engaged or wedding set before moving in together.

There was no stigma for living together or pre marital sex in mid 80’s onwards. Most of my friends lived with boyfriends as did I.

I think some of you are thinking of the 1960’s

I married young (early 20s) in the early 2000s. Once I found the man I wanted to spend my life with, I felt there was no point in waiting. Both of us preferred the commitment of marriage to just moving in together, and we wanted to start the next chapter of our lives. I imagine that's how a lot of people felt in decades past, even leaving aside any cultural expectations.

Life is uncertain. Two of my classmates married around the same time I did. He died well before 30, so if they'd waited, they'd have missed being married at all (and their children would never have been born).

I was married at 23 in 1984. It was a different world and it wasn't thought of as young. Some people may have lived together but nobody in my parents' world did! Our families would have been very disapproving.

No!!!! I think anyone who says it was is a young person with no idea of reality at that time! It wasn't the 1950s for god's sake 😁

I think it was more about having children than having sex. Getting married when you already have children and have been a family for years is a new cultural development.

Well in the Middle Ages it was because the average life span was 35. How far back do you want to go?

Mortgage, true. Bank account, no. Speaking of the early 70s, when I was first married. I'd had a bank account since childhood. But after marriage, the bank manager looked shocked when we opened a joint account, with me using my own name..."Oh, you're one of those women's libbers are you?" Sex before marriage happened, of course, but was still seen as shocking. Most girls married for sex. The contraceptive pill or any advice about avoiding pregnancy was illegal for unmarried girls. A child before marriage was hidden from polite society. There were no benefits for unmarried mothers, so girls were forced to marry the fathers or give their babies up for adoption unless her parents would support them. Our local vicar would marry pregnant couples provided there were no flowers, music or white dress. Registry office weddings were practically unheard of. Divorced people (vanishingly rare) could marry in the Presbyterian church only. My mother told me that we "women's libbers" were the cause of societal collapse, because we worked, had our own money, and therefore an escape from the misery of a wretched marriage. In her generation, she said, women just put up with it.

I got married when I was 19 and him 21 in 1980, we both loved each other.

It was commonplace to have sex before marriage in the 90s.

I think people were less risk averse then and life was more of an adventure and less of a path to trudge along.

I think premarital sex actually was still more widely frowned upon even in the 90s, especially the early 90s. In my family's circle it certainly was. That's not to say it didn't happen, obviously, and it wasn't anything new. But for many people, it was still more of a fringe choice to 'cohabitate' without marriage, and older relatives wouldn't have approved.

I wasn’t permitted to share a bedroom with my boyfriend (now dh) at my mil’s in mid 90s.

That didn't mean people mostly died by 35. The lifespan was hugely dragged down by infant mortality.

Because there was an expectation that adult life began younger - no eternal young adult stage stretching into your thirties.

This is matched and reinforced by economic conditions that allowed adult life to start younger. Ability to buy a house, far less push to attend university due to a larger range of jobs that didn’t require university and paid enough to support a family.

I think young people in the ‘90s were far more sexually active as a group than the covid generation but parents were a lot more “not under my roof” than the current middle aged generation. Lad/ladette culture was a big thing and people were a lot more social generally. I don’t think people saw themselves, or were treated as adolescents when they were in their 20s. Lots of people didn’t go to uni and most of the ones who did were also working - jobs were easier to come by and new graduates of 21 were living adult lives, not acting like 6th formers. I knew LOTS of teenage mums and some of them did marry but I think most people I knew who were married in their early 20s did so because they were working age adults in happy relationships who wanted to build their family life together. I think the ideal time to marry, should you be walking out with a nice chap, is early 20s, with children all arrived by early 30s. I think people marry late now.

I got married in 1990. I was almost 24. We'd been living together for about 18 months in my university city. My family, from a semi rural, working class village in the west of scotland, were mortified. His family, from a wee village near Ballymena in N.I., were far past mortified. They told us we were going to hell.
We got married because I was pregnant and our families' first reactions were, "Well, you'll have to marry her now."
2 years later, i was pregnant again and he left me for an older woman with a high paying job and no kids. According to his family, that was because I wasn't fulfilling my wifely duties well enough.
So I became a single mum, a demographic demonised throughout the 90s as everything that was wrong with society.
So, yes, outside of certain areas, living together was definitely frowned upon and being pregnant outside marriage was shameful.

1990 - Back in the olden days my reality is that it was the year I saw Oasis, the Prodigy, the Happy Mondays and the Chemical Brothers and I was still 'living in sin' with the man I'd been with since 1982.

And that was seen as a weird Australian TV thing that none of us would dream of doing so young.

I do wonder sometimes what younger posters exactly think we were doing in the late 80s and 90s. As a clue, it generally involved Snakebite & Black and condoms at some point in the proceedings.

It does change though! It might not look like it on the outside but I married my DH when we were both 31 after 5.5 years of living together and I can categorically say it felt and continues to feel different now that we are married. It’s an emotional change as well as a societal one.

I can’t imagine why you would want to commit to living with someone forever if you haven’t even checked you are compatible!

People felt societal pressure. Women were too young really and i imagine felt trapped. My MIL used to tell me that she was married by 19 and pregnant with her first. I was still clubbing until late 20s!

i never wanted to get married/have kids but back then i felt it was expected. I felt the pressure in my family for sure. If i had my time over, id stay single and no children

This thread is hilarious!
I got married at 27 in 1993, I had 3 children who came to see their dad and I marry, it wasn't unusual or frowned on at all. We are still together too. @Dollymylovehas the nail on the head, in your 20s you were adults, not kids, many of my contemporaries went to work at 16, no university, only a handful went there. Sensible parents didn't treat them as children in their mid teens but as young adults.

You are 2 years older than me, none of my friends got married or had kids before 30! We all traveling or at Uni at that age.

Back in the old days people didn’t live as long and they also aged much quicker. Most people in their 40s looked about 70.