The Perils of Marrying Young

I am 24 years old.  I’ve been married for four months.  And I know that, in 2012, this means that I got married really young.  (In 2009, the average woman was 26.5 at the time of her first marriage.  My October-born husband was only 23 at the time, making him almost five years short of the men’s average of 28.4.)

I did have doubts about getting married so young.  But they weren’t doubts about my relationship or doubts about the process or the institution of marriage in general, just doubts about the cultural implications of “getting married young.”  I knew the statistics and the horror stories and the general attitude toward and assumptions about the kinds of people who get married at this age, and I knew that I wasn’t one of those people.

Getting married emphasized for me the fact that most of the media I consume really isn’t geared toward me, that in some ways the coasts and the rural Midwest are different planets.  In the age of the Internet it’s easy to forget.  I have a friend who pays twice as much as I do for rent; I have a two-bedroom apartment and a garage, and she lives in a “room” that’s really just a curtained-off section of somebody’s living room.  She, of course, lives in New York City.  And despite knowing these very basic life differences, it’s easy to forget them, easy to think, “Well, Lily and I have so much in common, and we’re doing so many of the same things, we have the same uncertainties and the same opinions and we’re a lot alike,” and it’s easy to think that location is incidental.

What I’m getting at is that NYC Lily thought I was nuts for getting married.  It wasn’t that she thought I was making a bad decision—it’s that she couldn’t comprehend how, at my age, I could even think of marriage as an option, let alone a reasonable one.  My friends in South Dakota didn’t feel like that at all.  Some of them got married younger than I did; some were already divorced, but some were still quite happy and never gave it a second thought.  None of my relatives batted an eye or ever used the word “young” to describe our plans.  In fact, the reaction we usually got was, “What took you so long?”

Joe and I have been together more than a quarter of our lives.  He proposed two weeks after our sixth dating anniversary.  In the time that we’ve been together, we graduated high school and college.  We’ve worked after-school jobs and career-oriented 9-to-5s.  We broke up twice, for a couple of days each time, early on, and when we got back together those patches felt more like hiccups than breakups.  We have fought and loved and I’ll admit, getting married was really big and really scary in the context of culture, but within the context of my actual relationship it felt right, it really did.  He’s the person I love, and he’s my best friend.

And yet I feel as if I have to apologize for our marriage somehow, and every time I use the words “my husband” around the wrong crowd or around someone I don’t know, I get a little pang of uncertainty, a small fear that these people are now judging me and pegging me as a future divorcee (or, in the case of my old departmental secretary, pregnant).  And I don’t know, I have no crystal ball—maybe I am a future divorcee. I don’t think so, though, or I wouldn’t have gotten married.  I certainly don’t feel like one.  (I do know I’m not pregnant.)  A friend of mine who unexpectedly married her long-time boyfriend recently—neither of them are much for legal institutions—told me they did it for “social validation.”  All I could think was, “Really?  Because I feel the opposite of validated sometimes.”  It sometimes feels as though people take us less seriously now that we’re married—not the parents and uncles and insurance agents and realtors, but some of the professors and friends and liberals and oh-so-wise urban or coastal people we know. 

(I know I sound bitter about coastal people.  I am a little bitter about coastal people—take your “flyover zone” and shove it.  That said, I am admittedly generalizing, and yes, NYC Lily is the person a lot of this stems from, but Jennie from Des Moines and Rural-Nebraska-Carrie also have very decided opinions against—not my marriage, they assure me—but “the kinds of people who get married young.”  So, as always, my generalization here is probably unwarranted, but if you want to understand why a rural Midwesterner might feel slighted and insulted by coastal urbanites, check out DFW’s Harper’s piece, “Ticket to the Fair.”)

I am uncertain about my marriage sometimes, not in the day-to-day sense, but in the “holy crap forever is a long time to promise anything” sense.  I am uncertain in the same way that you are uncertain about a major move or a career change or reproducing.  It’s a major life change, not just in a broader concept of “social validation” but also, for us, in our day-to-day lives, since we didn’t live together beforehand.  (The opportunity to live alone was important to me.  It’s the same reason I chose to live in crappy apartments; I could only have had a nicer place if I had had roommates.)  “Divorce” has gone from “something other people have to worry about” to “something I could potentially have to worry about someday even if it’s not right now.”

The really hard thing about getting married young is that it’s such a grown-up move; it feels like it should catapult you into adulthood.  And it doesn’t.  It really, really doesn’t.  Of course, neither did living on my own or becoming financially indpendent or getting a legitimate non-waitressing job.  But those were all things I did while still in school, and for marriage, I waited, and now I get caught up in judging myself not against People My Age, but against Married People.  It’s a whole new demographic I’m part of.  And I cry or feel inadequate because look, those Married People can afford to buy a house.  Those Married People are qualified for things besides entry-level jobs.  Their resumes are better than mine.  For them, earning fifty thousand dollars a year isn’t some laughable dream; it’s something they can do right now. 

And I’m not that.  I’m only kind of a Married Person; in the statistical average sense, I’m really not comparable to other Married People.  I’m also a Young Person.  That means that I’m unemployed—by choice, kind of—and still working furiously on this incredibly frustrating thesis.  I’m job-hunting outside of what I’m trained for (I’d like to see what the “Real World” looks like, since all I’ve ever seen is restaurants and educational settings), so of course I’m looking at mostly entry-level stuff.  Without my degree, I am entry-level.  In the city I’ve chosen, rent is higher than property, so I could afford to buy a house with my husband pretty easily—just not while I’m unemployed.  And dammit, yes, $50,000 is a pipe dream.  But I am still in school, and I majored in something that doesn’t pay well, and I’m 24.  It’s easy to get caught up in the youth fetishization of being American, the false ideals peddled by, oh, every TV series ever, and to think that I’m really behind because I don’t have a career or a dream.  (I do, however, now have a bevy of wacky-but-lovable friends.)  It is so, so easy to forget that what looks like 24 in pop culture is really more like 29—or, in the case of Glee, what looks like “17” is more like 29, right, Cory Monteith and Mark Salling?—and those five years make a huge difference, right, 19-year-old self?  (Right.  So, so right.)

And that’s what I have to remember right now, on this bleak January day in this strange in-between time of my life.  This concept of “marrying young” has a reason for existing, and even if I’m not convinced that those negative notions of youth apply to my new marriage, I do have to remember that those notions do apply to my life in general.  I never, ever sought to be defined by my relationship status, and so I have to stop doing it to myself.  But my age, as frustrating as it is, is probably a more accurate way to define myself—or at least it feels better.  And the encouraging thing about youth kind of sucking sometimes is that, as I told my boss during my first semester of teaching when he told me I got good reviews except for a few comments that I was “too young”: “Yeah, I’m working on that part.”