Have you been scrolling through your Instagram feed recently, to find that another one of your 20-something year old friends from highschool is engaged? Then, you look around your little disaster of a room with clothes on the floor and empty coffee cups littering the desk, and try to fathom how someone could get married at this age. Then, begins the mental checklist of every single dysfunctional relationship you’ve ever had and remembering how you told yourself that once you were of marriageable age, you would be better at relationships. By then, you would have your dream job, somehow learn how to keep clothes folded, bake bread on a daily basis, be totally amazing at being in a relationship and just be good at life. However, now there’s this realization that “marriageable age” is now and if you’re not that picture perfect rockstar at life, will you ever be? Then, comes the multiple Dirty Dancing viewings, an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and becoming convinced that cats and succulents are your future.
So, the question is how are all these people so ready to commit to another person for the rest of their life? Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been an uptick in the amount of college-aged adults getting married. During this time, a lot of life factors that would have previously gotten in the way of a couple getting married have disappeared. There has also been this sense of holding on to those you love because the future is so uncertain. Whether it be from boredom or couples being able to grow closer through quarantine, the bottom line is they are committing to spend the rest of their lives with each other at quite a young age.
Now, someone getting married at around 23 years old would not have been so crazy even 30 years ago, but since the 70’s, the median age of marriage has been slowly rising. It has just been within the past 10 years that people are not getting married until 27 or 28. Consequently, it may just seem like people are getting married super young because this generation has grown up in an era where most people are not getting married until their late twenties or early thirties. This is due to many factors, one of them being that marriage is no longer seen as a necessity or a “life step.” It has become normal for people to wait to get married or for them to opt out of marriage altogether. This has changed the narrative for couples, especially women. With the ongoing feminist movements, women do not need to get married young to establish themselves in society or be successful in life. They can focus on their career and education first. Generations getting married at older ages doesn’t necessarily mean that they are slower at getting their life together or were not ready for marriage as young. It just means that they had more options and could wait if they wanted to.
Maybe this recent increase in young people getting married has nothing to do with how great they are at life. Maybe, that simply is just not what marriage is about. If you don’t feel ready to be married, that’s okay! It’s not your time. If you are just chomping at the bit to get married, well kudos to you. Who knows- maybe in the next five years, we’ll see an uptick in divorces or maybe people will finally understand that marriage is not tied to an age and it’s different for everyone. Get married when you’re 23 or get married when you’re 80, who cares! It’s your life; live it the way you want and remember, you’ve always got the cats and succulents as back up.