Truth #2: Waiting can provide some benefits.
I unpacked this in an earlier blog, but briefly: the trend of “adulting” and maturing for a few more years before marriage provides some benefits. There is something protective about having enough experience to see the pitfalls ahead with clear eyes. Some younger couples face intense challenges simply because they went into marriage expecting everything to be puppies and rose petals, and hadn’t thought through how to handle challenges.
The young woman I met at that event, and her husband, fell into that category. After the wedding they realized they had drastically different expectations for big issues like the frequency of sex, how to handle money, and how to handle communication while he was deployed. And at age 20 and 22, they simply weren’t sure how to handle the disconnects. There were lots of fights while they figured it out. She realized they could have prevented much of that hardship if they had purposefully talked through certain things in advance.
Because of that dynamic, it is sobering but important to know that getting married at younger ages is associated with higher divorce rates. This doesn’t mean your marriage has a higher risk of divorce – especially if you think through some of the roadblocks and key factors ahead of time! But overall divorce rates rise for people who marry early, and fall for those who marry a bit later. In fact, according to one landmark study, at least 60% of the ongoing decline in the U.S. divorce rate is due to the fact that people are, on average, getting married at older ages.
So yes, there are some benefits to waiting. But that’s not the end of the story.
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