In Response to an Article in Support of Early Marriage

I wrote this as a facebook comment after this article was posted... again:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/august/16.22.html?start=7

PREFACE: I'm obviously not married, and I'm really working through my own thoughts and beliefs on marriage, and I do not downplay the pain of divorce or the difficulty surrounding the entire discussion. I know the temptations out there, and the loneliness, but I've also watched close friends wade through the ocean of pain a divorce can cause in addition to my own experience growing up with an awesome mom, but a single mom who struggled daily to raise us and find a life of her own after her own divorce from my dad.


"I'm still working on the article for a second read-through, but just wanted to throw some rough statistics out there:

90% of men and 70% of women currently married have never been divorced. What? Then how do half of all marriages end in divorce? Notice the language and the disparity of statistics. Most people don't get divorced. Most people who get divorced get divorced multiple times. What drives the statistic up so high? 18-25 year old who get married and divorced early, and usually 2-3 times. The early marry-ers get more statistical weight than those who stay married.

We tend to use the metrics of our forebears without reaching the same maturity our forebears did. We think, hear, and say things like "My grandparents were married at 16 and 17, and my parents were married by 20 with me two years later." But we fail to recognize that -we as a generation are behind the curve... by a lot!-

Erickson and Piaget had these stages of crisis and development based on observation. They've been tweaked over time, but what is clear is this: we are between 5 and 10 years BEHIND the stages our grandparents went through, meaning they differentiated psychologically/psychosocially long before we did. We start working later, we stay in school longer, we take much longer to decide careers, and eventually we get married later. The objection that AGE does not affect divorce rates or marital readiness is true-ish: chronological age might not, but life STage certainly does. Our psychology and sociology cannot keep up with our biology.


Meanwhile we keep pumping sexually charged movies and clothes and jokes into our young men (and women) and churning out an endless spree of "chick porn" (chick flicks) and creating concepts of what a woman (and a man) should look like and how a man (and a woman) should act.

So maybe the problem isn't the -age- at which we get married. Maybe its that we as a culture (and as Christian sub-culture) have absolutely no identity in our relationships and have no practical and helpful method of enculturating a better understanding of marriage and relationships, replete with answer to questions my generation IS asking: What's the PURPOSE of marriage? How to I have a successful (FULFILLING, not just lasting) marriage? How can COMMUNITY play a role in marriage before AND after the wedding?

It's 2:38 and I still have another short paper to write before morning, so I'll stop."