The Case Against Young Marriage

I want to comment briefly here on a pair of articles that recently ran in Slate, the online magazine. The topic was marrying at an early age and the first article was written by a woman, Julia Shaw, who got married at a relatively young age (23). The other was a rebuttal article by another woman, Amanda Marcotte, for whom the advice to consider marrying young is anathema, what she calls a “conservative hobbyhorse.”

As far as marrying early goes, it would appear that I have a dog in the fight given my own relatively early marriage and while I do think marrying young can be delightful and ought to be considered before being dismissed out of hand, I am in no way dogmatic about this belief. But I was struck as I read Marcotte’s rebuttal at both the wrongheadedness of the data she compiles and the spleen with which she treats Shaw’s modest exhortation.

Shaw’s story is rather simple and fairly common. She went to college with big dreams and ambitions and no plans of being one of those girls who got married the week after graduation. She then met a guy and fell in love and married him way before she imagined she would. He was 25 and she was 23. (Clara once had a deal with a friend to not get married until she was 28, by which point in real life we had been married for four years and had a child. Life is like that.) What she found was that marriage wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but there was something really great about taking the steps toward maturation together. She and her husband were independent, where a lot of her unmarried friends were still fairly dependent financially on their parents, and they had decided to forego lavish vacations to build a life together. Her encouragement to her intended audience of similarly educated, middle class college graduates was that maybe our culture is not right when it tells us to wait until we are older to get married. Maybe there is something beautiful about doing life, all of life, with another person. She doesn’t say marriage is a silver bullet, only that our emphasis on marriage as the ultimate expression of love between soul mates forces a lot of people to wait unnecessarily. Sometimes the commitment of marriage makes that person all the more lovable to us. I remember well on our honeymoon watching Clara watch the monkeys playing around in the trees outside of our hotel room and thinking that I had no idea what love was four days before that when we exchanged vows.

Marcotte can barely stifle her disdain for this type of marriage proselytizing. She takes Shaw’s claim that exchanging the wedding vows in front of God and all of your friends and family can actually strengthen the bond you feel with your spouse as nonsense. Her main traction point for her argument is that people who get married at a young age tend to get divorced at a higher rate than those who marry older. Which is true, although not in the way Marcotte claims, as I will show briefly.

Marcotte has a weird paragraph in the middle where she uses Shaw’s financial independence from her parents as evidence that she is “talking up how much more cool stuff she can supposedly afford. . . now that she’s married.” But this is a complete (and willful) misreading. Shaw isn’t bragging about being able to afford a bunch of cool stuff. Quite the opposite. Shaw’s whole point is that she cannot afford a lot of the stuff her unmarried friends afford because most of her unmarried friends are still supported by their parents. She isn’t bragging, only asserting that marriage has made her more independent.

The lynchpin of Marcotte’s argument is that young marriages lead to more divorces. Something she is remiss to point out, and a fact hiding in plain sight at the bottom of the Chicago Tribune article she cites as damning the case for young marriage (people would be far more successful if they actually read the entire article they cite to bolster their claim; it is almost like she Googled “young divorce” and pasted the link to the first site that came up), is that young marriage is not such a big deal if you have a college education. Marriage at any age is generally more successful when both partners have received higher education. Shaw isn’t speaking to high school dropouts encouraging them to get hitched; she is telling her fellow college graduates that there is not necessarily a reason to kick the marriage can down the road until your 30s.

Marcotte ends by saying that she is “glad young marriage is working out for Shaw” but the entire tone of her article betrays this sentiment. She wants Shaw’s young marriage to fail, as she wants all young marriages to fail, in order to prove her point that young marriages fail. And her claim at the end that for the majority of women dating and cohabiting is working out just fine is another example of statistical disingenuousness. It is true, of course, for the elites in the system, but cohabiting and bearing children outside of marriage is wreaking havoc on the lower classes in this country.

So Marcotte’s argument collapses on itself. She is correct when she says that young marriages have a higher divorce rate, but she neglects to point out that if you break this out for educational attainment and income, i.e. the people Shaw is addressing in her article, then the divorce rate plummets. Her argument on this score has little to do with the reality of Shaw’s target demographic. On the other hand, she argues that delayed marriage and cohabiting is working out fine for women, but neglects to mention that what she means by “women” is educated, white women. In reality, then, both Shaw’s argument and Marcotte’s second claim, when applied to Shaw’s intended audience, are true. Educated people with middle to upper-middle class incomes can marry at whatever age they want and be generally successful. One demographer has joked that the key to a successful life is as simple as not getting married before 20 and waiting to have kids until after you are married.

Marcotte's last paragraph is symptomatic of the derangement even the suggestion of marrying young can throw some openminded people into. She begins her concluding paragraph: “Watching conservatives desperately try to bully women into younger marriage with a couple of promises and a whole lot of threats is highly entertaining but clearly not persuasive.” Maybe there are conservatives out there threatening women with dire consequences if they wait to get married until they are 30, holding shotguns to women’s backs and all, but she in no way proves it in her little rant. Shaw, her ostensible sparring partner in this debate, nowhere threatens or bullies or even promises a grand ole time once you tie the knot. Shaw’s claim is limited: young marriage can be fantastic. Marcotte’s is absolute: young marriage will ruin your life and Shaw just hasn’t wised up to that fact yet.

Her inability to engage with Shaw, specifically her inability to do Shaw the favor of actually treating her article as if it were written to a very specific audience, is unfortunate and sloppy. But her splenetic rant against young marriage as a conservative means of controlling women and her glee at predicting divorce for participants in young marriages is something more: an ideological rigidity and refusal towards charity worthy of Marcotte's most egregious targets on the right. It is funny how closeminded these openminded people can be.