It goes up. Now I think people that get married before 40 are weird.
On serious note… It’s any age. You can tell when a couple is just trying to reproduce an image of “family” because they were told it’s the next thing to do in life. Working in retail id often see families you could tell just went through the motions and that everyone was disconnected from one another. It’s sad.
I’m in my mid-50s. The generation older than me - my aunts and uncles - generally were in school until grade 8 and were out of the house and working by 16. My mother had her older sister as her teacher.
24 is not a child. You can vote drive, drive, drink, marry sign legal documents etc. And at least for women fertility begins to decline at 32. If you mean you will continue to grow as a person and develop new interests that hopefully never goes away. I went to grad school and was in academia for over a decade after my PhD. I have made two major shifts in my career since then. Old people still feel like they are in their twenties or early thirties mentally, we joke about it all the time. So congratulations, this is it.
Yeah, whatever “Dr Bob”, do you think you’re some kind of doctor or something? Show off…
Yeah. There was a point when I was thinking I’d keep this account professional and share it with my students. Unlike my other social media accounts. lol
So, you agree with OP? There is not an argument against it here.
at least for women fertility begins to decline at 32.
That’s a little bit of a yikes there, buddy.
Edit: and additional “yikes” for all of the people that don’t see the problem with assigning a value to women based on how fertile they may or may not be.
Edit 2: tHe QuAnTiTy Of EgGs! Because women only exist to get pregnant.
How can a fact be yikes? It’s only relevant if women want children, but if they do then the earlier the safer it is.
Why is that a yikes? More birth defects, complications, start running low on eggs. All of that is just facts…
They said nothing about the value of a woman being tied to fertility, that came out of mind…
As for the decline in fertility statement, that has been scientifically proven for decades and assumed for centuries. Women are born with a set amount of eggs, they typically go through at least one per ovulation cycle, they start reaching the end in their 30s and risks of birth defects start increasing in their 30s
I believe you are the one who is confused and making unwarranted assumptions here.
So biological facts are now cringe?
The question was about marriage. There are two reasons that I see people get married. For young people it’s about starting a family. However you and I feel about it personally, legal structures that are in place just make it easier when you’re married. The other reason is for older people. Pensions and estate planning is easier for married couples. Again, I have opinions about it but it remains a plain fact.
I got married to share healthcare and other tax advantages and do not plan to have children. I’m under 30 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I envy you. My partner and I are DINKs. There has never been a tax break aimed at our demographic. lol.
I swear some people go out of their way to judge others for the most ridiculous things. Maybe try asking yourself why you are not happy about people finding love without going through half a dozen shitty relationships.
Probably 75% of marriages like that don’t go well. OP is right.
There are enough readily available marriage stats that you don’t need to make one up.
I want to normalize the use of statasstics for ass-pulled statistics.
That doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing though. Divorce doesn’t have to be traumatic, and it should be more normalized.
Oh brother
Wow, really? Sure is an expensive and necessarily painful thing to opt into or to normalize. I’d rather it be normalized to not get married in the first place.
I think a divorce is like $80 where I am, but if you have to go to court obvs it’s a lot more. I spent almost nothing on my wedding, granted it was just friends and was an elopement. Marriage has big tax advantages for some, and it’s the only way my spouse was getting health insurance to survive this godforsaken wasteland. It also guarantees that they get a slice of my income if the unforeseeable happens and we split so they can survive.
I think people should not see marriage as the end goal, but be pragmatic about its costs and benefits, which I think you are getting at too
It’s not that expensive, I did it for $400 amicably. We had a fun time while married and I don’t regret it. Why not just make it easier for people to do what they want and not punish young people for making decisions.
And yet it’s costed others (every day) thousands to millions of dollars
Imagine the following scenario: you meet someone in college, and when you graduate at 22 you don’t want to split up. They say sure, let’s live together, but we need to get engaged; if it doesn’t work out we can just break it off. After a year you realize your lives are much better together. You decide to get married but not to have kids until you’re 30. If it doesn’t work out you can divorce, but you sign a prenup and at least no kids would be involved.
If you both have clear and compatible career goals, that scenario saves you a lot of dating drama and gives you valuable support. I wouldn’t call someone in that scenario “weird.”
Yeah I’ve noticed at least a lot from my high-school group that dating for about 4 years is a good amount of time, me personally and a lot of close friends seemed to have hit their hardships in a relationship around that 4 year mark. Also moving is a good test about how you do in stress haha
Been married for 10 years now. There’s one thing I’ve found to be the ultimate relationship tester:
Furniture Assembly.
If you can survive assembling a few pieces of IKEA puzzles together it’s probably going to last XD
Our way of surviving furniture assembly is for him to Go Away And Let Me Do It, because I can follow directions and he just tries to slap things together without looking xD
I love my husband! Knowing when to just let the other person get on with shit is a pretty good litmus test, I agree, lol.
I think the main point here is people around those ages aren’t fully capable of making those kinds of decisions in the first place.
There’s a reason why most marriages end in divorce after all.
Get married before you have a clue. Get a clue after being married a couple years. Get a divorce because you realize you had no idea what you were doing.
I see a pretty stark difference between people who married young and had kids right away, vs people who married young and enjoyed their time for a while before having kids. The ones who had kids seem weird to me, never got a chance to goof off in their 20s and figure out who they are. The ones who waited feel more normal. But that’s just my experience.
The ones who had kids seem weird to me, never got a chance to goof off in their 20s and figure out who they are.
I definitely needed to goof off in my 20s and figure out who I was. But not everybody is like that, and the meme in question suggests it’s “weird” to know who you are and not need to goof off.
This is the main point here, IMO. A child is a huge responsibility and the early 20s is a period of life you’re still figuring things out. Culture also plays a role here; where I’m from, people are deciding to live together (without having kids) for a couple of years before formally marrying.
Having a kid in your 20s is not for you, but you can’t just assume that that is the case for everyone else.
I mean, let’s take this post: what is so magical about 24? Why not 25? Why not 23? I imagine the number was pretty arbitrary. It just sounded right to OP.
How old are you? No need to be specific this isn’t a creepy question lol just roughly what age are you? Because I don’t think we can make any sort of broad assessment until the people who had kids when they were young have kids out of the house. I know plenty
of people who are enjoying their 40’s with kids happily going off to college around that time. If you have kids in your early to mid 30’s - assuming you stopped at 35, which isn’t a given - you’re starting to have them out in your mid 50’s. Those are very different times for you, physically, mentally, professionally, etc. even if it doesn’t seem like it.I imagine for many in this thread it is too early to be making a final assessment. I think also a lot of people here forget that nobody is thrusting these decisions upon them (except maybe overeager parents who want to be grandparents, in which case they need to back off). Different people have different objectives/goals in life. They aren’t worse off for not doing it your way.
The strongest marriage I know is my buddy from high school who married his high school sweetheart, right when they graduated college at 21. They just had their 3rd kid at 35 and they’re ecstatic. First was at 22 or so.
The point is a post like this shows a certain amount of hubris/lack of imagination/lack of exposure to people with different lifestyles and priorities.
Can we stop extending “just a kid” into ever older years? Society already years anybody under 18 like they’re the same as a goddamn fetus. Human life expectancy being what it is, we shouldn’t be treating people… not even like they don’t know anything but like they couldn’t even conceivably know anything for fully a third of it.
I don’t know how it is for you, but when I look back at 24-year-old me, I am not impressed. I guess what I’m saying is that there are a lot of us who definitely don’t have their shit together when they’re 24. They say your prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until 25 at the earliest, but I feel like it was closer to 30 for me. Granted, I’m kind of a dummy anyway, so this probably doesn’t apply to everyone.
24-year-old me was an awesome badass and I regret nothing.
That reads as “I couldn’t make those decisions at that age, so obviously no one else could.”
I say this as someone that had my first child at 23, after talking about it with my girlfriend since the age of 19.
We don’t regret a thing. (Well, apart from not winning the lottery. Yet.)
Just wait. 45 year old me was cringe. And 35 year old me? How did that guy even have friends.
Is 18 years a third of your life given todays life span?
Where do you live where the expected life span is just 56? O.o
I think they’re referring to the 24 number op originally stated, that is roughly a third of the life expectancy for males at least.
I married my first wife when she was 18 and I was 20. We went through a lot of hardship. It should not have worked out: we were both poor, from broken homes, in an LDR from different worlds. She was the popular girl, I was a shy and awkward nerd. When we got married, we had only been in one another’s presence for a few weeks total. I went into the marriage not expecting a path or plan, as my parents were toxic which ended with my mother’s suicide, and my mother in law had been married 4 times before she became single for the last time. None of us had healthy marriages to draw from. At our wedding, her relatives even said, “I give it two years, tops.” We were desperately poor, and struggled most of our marriage with health and money issues.
But we made it work for 25 years. We’d still be married, but she passed away ten years ago. We became “foxhole buddies,” us against the world.
While I also feel it is weird, I strongly believe marrying kids (<18) should be illegally nationally with no exceptions. I have personally witnessed lives destroyed.
Lol for me all people who marry are weird why draw the line at a certain age
I was just a kid… why would you think I’d know better?
I also think that when I see people of that age married or with kids. But I think it’s just because of our different life experiences.
I opted to enroll in a PhD right after graduating and so, at 30, I still feel like my life isn’t at a point when I can start thinking about kids or marriage. But I know a lot of people enter relatively stable jobs as soon as they graduate university (or high school, although in my circles everyone went to university - it’s not as expensive as in the US here). I can understand people in that position starting to think about family earlier than me.
I don’t trust anybody that isn’t a wizard.
Do whatever you want. Maybe your marriage will last, maybe it won’t. Live your life. Take chances.
I think anyone that refers to an adult as a child is weird.
I married at 22 over 20 years ago did not regret a day… I think a happy marriage is just a lot of luck a lot of self reflection and effort. No matter the age it is not a self running maintenance free system
Luck is something I didn’t consider.
I met my wife in high-school, we married at 21/22, it’s going to be our 19th anniversary this year. So yeah, definitely got lucky, and I would discourage my kids from doing the same even though it worked great for us.
I doubt waiting makes people any luckier in that respect. In the end, it’s a gamble.
Two reasons to wait:
- people in their early 20s are more likely to change dramatically later, so definitely more of a gamble at that age
- because it’s a gamble, you should already be well prepared for life on your own before doing it; that gives you a solid fallback in case things don’t work out
I think overcomming obstacles growing as people together is an experience and bonding I would have never liked to miss. Going from a broke ass Teenager to now was a wild trip and my wife was there the whole time. She changed and I changed but we never changed apart because we communicated about our inner selves
But that’s where the gamble is. You changed together and it worked out. Others grow apart through no fault of their own and despite their desire to keep things working, they just don’t want the same things anymore. Your and my experience are the lucky ones.
