Cultural differences around the age of getting married

[nickymanchester]

I just had a very interesting chat with my DH where he was telling me some of the things that his work colleagues had been telling him about what the expectations of marriage are where they are located.

I just had no idea that there were such differences. Am I naive to not have realised that these attitudes still exist?

By way of background, DH works for a large engineering company that have operations throughout the world and he was talking to some colleagues in the USA (specifically in the southeast US - that is North & South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi etc).

One colleague just mentioned that his daughter, who is in the final year of university, had just got married. My DH expressed surprise about that, with her being so young and still studying, but he said that this was quite normal in that part of the world.

Apparently their zoom meeting then got side tracked into a discussion on this and a couple of them said that in the Southeast USA, there still seems to be familial/societal pressure for girls to be married by the time they graduate college.

Another colleague also mentioned that his daughter had got married in the summer before her last year of college as well and since then had attended over 25 weddings of friends in similar situations over the last two years.

Another colleague, who is based in the midwest (places like Nebraska, Kansas etc) said it was a similar situation there with loads of weddings in the first year or two after college.

Perhaps I should have put this in AIBU, but AIBU to be surprised that there is still this sort of pressure or expectation in a western country in the 21st century?

Elsewhere in the US, things are obviously very different (or, at least, I presume they are) as the US Census Bureau says that the median age for first marriage for a woman is 27.9.

The average age for first marriage for a woman in the UK is 32.

Now, obviously, a lot fewer people are actually getting married these days and there is less pressure on people to get married.

However, for there to be a four year difference in age of first marriage between the UK and the US shows that there are some real cultural differences.

It's even more stark when you look at individual states. In many of the states in the southeast and midwest the median age of first marriage for a woman is 25 or 26.

Whereas in places like New York or Washington it is about 30 - a lot closer to the UK figure.

When my DH mentioned this conversation to me I didn't think much about it, but the fact that the age of first marriage in those states is so much lower than in the UK (and other parts of the US) show that, yes, this is actually still a thing in those parts of the US - an expectation that women are to be married off as soon as is reasonable.

Are we (or, at least, some Americans) still living in a world like that?

In Denmark you get ritually humiliated if you are 25 or 30 and not married. One you get attacked with pepper and one with cinnamon but I cant remember which is which. Not unusual for sculptures (oil barrels or old cars) to appear in your driveway announcing to the world you are 30 and not married.

The average age has risen to 32 for women and 34 for men so this tradition strikes me as really odd.

‘Most people I know are completely different to the person they were in their early 20s by the time they hit 30. Different priorities and interests, for better or worse.’

Don’t psychologists claim personality is fixed in your early twenties?

Either way, it is all rather secondary to the when is safest to have kids, and that is in your twenties.

StrictlyAFemaleFemale

That’s really hideous and aweful and backwards

Having had a brief look into it, apparently personality changes across the whole of your life, but is strongly influenced by social role.

I suppose if you get married and kids young that is going to push you towards certain traits.

Like my level of extroversion increased when I had young kids, and decreased when they were older.

Honestly I'm not sure I've stopped changing. I'm very different to who I was in my 20s vs 30s vs 40s. If you find the right partner I don't see why not get married and have kids in your 20s. It gives you the best chance of having healthy children. I thought the number one predictor of a marriage lasting was the women's level of education?

@DeepThinkingGirl

StrictlyAFemaleFemale

That’s really hideous and aweful and backwards

I know! Was really shocked when I moved here!

I assumed this is why the high school prom date is such a big deal in so many American movies - apologies to Americans reading, but your TV and cinema give the impression that the last years of school are about finding 'the one'. I presume the high cost of going off to university and the lack of an NHS to deal with the sort of issues more likely to arise with having children later in life also play into this. Many friends here in the UK are having children at the same time as having to deal with ageing parents (also too old to help with childcare), and the health issues that arise as you get older, but we have a better social safety net in the UK to help with these difficulties.

@LibertyMole

Having had a brief look into it, apparently personality changes across the whole of your life, but is strongly influenced by social role.

I suppose if you get married and kids young that is going to push you towards certain traits.

Like my level of extroversion increased when I had young kids, and decreased when they were older.

I've seen some interesting discussions on the pushing back of people marrying and having kids essentially resulting in people maturing later.

Which then leads people to say, well people that age are too immature to marry. Similarly with people having their first jobs later, taking on other adult roles later.

@IvyTwines2 State university's for residents is often less costly than U.K. fees for university. There are also a ton more scholarships and bursaries for lower income and talented kids. Almost no one pays the sticker price. It's a completely different system. Working 15 hours a week in Starbucks will get you health insurance. A lot of the sob stories about lack of insurance are from people who chose not to take advantage of National or state programs or chose to underinsure themselves because they didn't want to have higher premiums and lacked some serious foresight.

I assumed this is why the high school prom date is such a big deal in so many American movies - apologies to Americans reading, but your TV and cinema give the impression that the last years of school are about finding 'the one'.

Generally speaking, people in the US don't expect to marry their high school prom date nor do they view high school as the opportune venue in which to find their life partner.

Interesting discussion. For me, marriage at a young age is only problematic if you’re a teen girl being shipped off to some grim middle-aged distant cousin as if you’re in a Victorian novel or 19th century aristocracy. A 20 year old woman willingly marrying her similarly aged boyfriend doesn’t bother me at all.

@webuiltthiscityonrockandwheat

Agree with it being a religious thing. My husband and I are Christian and we were married at 24 and 22. It's incredibly normal within our church for people to be married before they're 25. We know a lot of people from a Christian college in Texas and they all get married young, more so than over here. I've just had my second baby at 32 and feel ancient compared to some of them!

Same here, and also early 20s! I never felt any social pressure to get married young but it was what we wanted. I've heard the analogy of getting married young being like a "start up marriage" and getting married a bit later being like a "merger marriage". There are positives to both paths, both marriages can thrive, you just have different struggles too- in a start up you start with few resources, in a merger it might be harder to combine two established ways of doing things.

Yeah it's a little naive to think that these Christian/religious attitudes don't exist in the west anymore.

Ive worked with people in the UK who are very adherent and married young before cohabiting (don't know them well enough to know of they abstained from sex as well, but I presume so).

I grew up in a few different places (not in Europe) and there were always lots of missionary families (different types, some evangelical, some Mormons, etc) and all their kids married quite young, before 25 for sure.

I married at 24 and divorced shortly after! I wasn't religious, just immature and impulsive. I didn't have a stable family background growing up and so wasn't developed enough emotionally or practically at that age to make good choices. I know others who married just after University and are still happily together, but they are from stable, loving homes. If you haven't had that, there's a lot of work to be done on yourself first. I look at those who married young and stayed together with curiosity, as I just can't imagine it - I'm a completely different person to the one I was in my early twenties, and I now find the man I married repulsive. I'm glad not to live in an age where it's compulsory to marry, and particularly not to have young girls married off at a young age. That said, I have no problem with people getting young if they're mature enough and it's completely down to their own individual choice.

Is it due to the value placed on people (especially women) "saving themselves" for marriage? I wouldn't want to wait till I was 32 🙃

Maybe there is also a link to pregnancy - "shotgun weddings", quite a few of my female relatives got married because they were pregnant in the 60s and 70s. Maybe in more conservative states it'd be frowned upon to have a baby "outside of wedlock". Or to terminate an unplanned pregnancy? And maybe there's more unplanned pregnancy in the socially conservative states with abstinance-only sex ed. Though all of this would probably only account for a small amount of the young weddings.

Agree about really posh (upper middle and upper class / old money) people getting married younger, I was surprised that David Cameron's wife was only 25 when they got married! I think he was a bit older.

My dsis was married at 16 with the help of an aunt (sort of matchmaker) she'd asked for it though of course. !9 is on the shelf, unless of course you have been encouraged to gain an education, which is quite acceptable in this day and age.
We are also virgins when we marry, rarely are girls given the opportunity to be with boys without a chaperone. This is usually an older family member. If you have a lot of brothers they won't come near you.

I know one couple who got married aged about 30, though they actually met as students, so they'd been together a long time (not cohabiting, though). They said, "It really feels like time to do it. All of our friends have been married for years. Some of them divorced and married again."

I'm from a northern state - with higher ages of first-time marriage than other US states. Women in my family, even several generations back into Norway and Germany, married mid-20s or later. I think it's cultural to a great extent. There's the southern US culture (which is as foreign to me as another country) but I know of evangelical Christians who have a thing to get married right after college graduation-and there are many, many Christian colleges.

Also, as a country of immigrants, if you have recent immigrants from some countries they traditionally have a lower marriage rate, that is also going to bring the age rate down.

Some strict religious groups like Orthodox Jews, Evangelical Christians, Mormons, Somali Muslims, Amish, etc. marry young. If I were to generalize, 1st/2nd/3rd descendants of Japanese, Chinese, Scandinavian, Russian, upper class Indian marry later.

US southerners IN general do tend to have earlier marriage rates, but I wonder if that's an obsession with weddings and the beauty pageant -high school-prom-sorority pipeline.

White US southerners, I might add, descend mainly from British and Scottish folks...so clearly lots of cultural changes since they left the UK!

I'm UK, got married at 21, he was 22. Just had our 25th anniversary and youngest DC has just gone to university.

We have definitely both changed since we first married but we have grown together. We have different hobbies and things but similar values and ambitions.

We have definitely both changed since we first married but we have grown together. We have different hobbies and things but similar values and ambitions.

Awww

US southerners IN general do tend to have earlier marriage rates, but I wonder if that's an obsession with weddings and the beauty pageant -high school-prom-sorority pipeline.

As I said, it's not much younger than the national average. Also the southern US is much more diverse than many people realize, and much less influenced by conservative Christianity than most people realize. The so-called "prom-beauty pageant-sorority pipeline" is a very small aspect of southern US culture, especially the beauty pageant and sorority aspect.

I am from one is those southeastern states. I'm not sure "pressure" is how I'd describe it, it's just more common for people to settle down with a partner they've met at uni, it's seen as quite normal and of course uni is a great place to meet people (she says, fruitlessly swiping the dating apps for a 40-something single man who isn't absolutely sure...). Religion definitely plays a role in shaping that culture.

My branch of the family isn't terribly religious, but my sister had to hide from our dad the fact that she cohabited with her uni boyfriend for several years (they married after 10 years and are still together decades later). I was quite shocked when I moved to the UK and discovered how many Brits had children without getting married first, I was very naive!

*absolutely dire, not sure...

But, yes, I agree with SenecaFalls. Plenty of us from the South have nothing to do with sororities or prom queens and aren't particularly religious.

I think it's also important to consider that when looking at statistics about people who identify as Christians in the US, that also includes more liberal churches, like Episcopal, Presbyterian (USA), Methodist, etc. For example, the US Episcopal Church is actually ahead of most of the Anglican Communion, including the C of E, in solemnizing same sex marriages.