(Early) Love and Marriage

When it works, it works

AUDIO VERSION:

Robert and I got married when I was 18, and he was 19. We were high-school sweethearts, and by today’s standards that sounds somewhere between quaint and clinically inadvisable. We had very little money. We had no established careers, very few assets, and we were renting a converted garage to live in. Basically, we were dirt poor. When we got married, we were so poor that the priest offered Robert a job sweeping floors in the church. Robert had started college; I hadn’t. Graduate school was still somewhere in the distant future, and neither of us had finished becoming the people we would eventually become. By most of the conventional measures used today to determine whether a young couple is “ready” for marriage, we probably weren’t. And yet, almost five decades later, here we are.

For most of my adult life, I have heard the conventional wisdom about couples like us: marry too young, and you are far more likely to divorce. Plenty of research appears to support that conclusion. In American observational studies, people who marry in their teens and very early twenties have historically had higher divorce rates than people who wait until their mid-to-late twenties. The finding has been repeated often enough that it has become received wisdom. Finish your education. Establish a career. Become financially independent. Figure out who you are. Then marry. Young marriage, we are told, is a risk factor, and delaying marriage is one of the things young adults can do to improve their chances of making it last.

But when I started digging into the actual literature, the story became considerably more complicated. The first problem is the one that comes up over and over again in science: correlation is not causation. People are not randomly assigned to marry at 19 or 29. Particularly in contemporary America, people who marry at 19 are a very unusual subset of 19-year-olds, and they differ from those who marry at 29 in ways that may independently affect their likelihood of divorce. Income, education, religion, family structure, geography, unintended pregnancy, cohabitation, previous relationships, attitudes toward marriage and divorce, and probably a host of personality and cultural factors that are difficult to measure are all tangled up with the age at which people marry. When a marriage that began at 19 fails, it is surprisingly difficult to determine how much of the risk stems from being 19 and how much from everything else that statistically accompanies marrying at 19.

Researchers have tried to get around this problem, with some fascinating results. One particularly clever American study used the Vietnam-era draft as a natural experiment. In 1965, married men received preferential treatment in the military draft until President Lyndon Johnson abruptly changed the rules, creating a temporary incentive for some young men to marry sooner than they otherwise would have. If marrying earlier were itself a major cause of divorce, those marriages should have been more likely to fail. They weren’t. A similar quasi-experimental study in China used a government policy change that altered marriage timing and likewise found no evidence that marrying somewhat earlier increased divorce among young adults.

That does not mean age is irrelevant, and it certainly does not mean that child marriage or marriage in the very early teens is harmless. Those are very different populations, often involving coercion, interrupted education, poverty and enormous power imbalances. Nor does this research prove that everyone should run out and get married at 19. What it suggests is something narrower, but much more interesting: once we are talking about young adults rather than children, the simple claim that delaying marriage by several years causes a more stable marriage becomes surprisingly difficult to demonstrate.

The picture becomes even less tidy when researchers stop defining marital success simply as “not divorced.” Norval Glenn, Jeremy Uecker and Robert Love examined five American datasets and considered both marital stability and the quality of the marriages that survived. They did not find a steady improvement in marital success as age at marriage increased. Instead, the highest estimated probability of being in an intact, high-quality marriage occurred among people who first married at roughly 22 to 25. Later marriages had good survival rates, but marital quality did not continue improving simply because marriage was postponed. Their conclusion was not that 22 is some magical age for marriage, but that there was little evidence for the increasingly common assumption that deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid-twenties necessarily improves the chances of marital success.

Which leaves us with a rather different question. Instead of asking simply whether people who marry young divorce more often, perhaps we should ask why the people who marry young divorce more often. Those are not the same question. If age itself is the cause, then Robert and I were fortunate exceptions to a fairly predictable rule. But if age is partly a marker for the people who marry young, the circumstances under which they marry, the partners they choose, and the ideas about marriage they bring with them, then perhaps the number 18 or 19 tells us considerably less than we have assumed.

Another side of the equation receives far less attention. People who form a good marriage in young adulthood and sustain it for decades appear to have an unusually favorable life trajectory. Long, stable marriages are associated with greater life satisfaction, economic and social stability, better health and greater longevity. The strongest signal may therefore not be early marriage at all. It may be a long, good marriage. That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the question considerably. If you meet the right person at 22 and are still happily married at 72, you have accumulated fifty years of marriage: fifty years of building a home, pooling resources, raising children, surviving illnesses and financial setbacks, creating friendships and community, and eventually watching children become adults and perhaps grandchildren arrive. It is also fifty years of having another human being who knows when something is wrong, notices when you are sick, has a stake in your health and survival, and shares an enormous portion of your history. Those years are an asset in their own right, and they cannot be accumulated retrospectively.

Of course, causation is just as difficult here. A couple who has remained happily married for fifty years is already a highly selected group. The qualities that helped them stay married, such as conscientiousness, emotional stability, loyalty, religious commitment, financial responsibility, the ability to compromise and perhaps simply good judgment in choosing a spouse, may also help explain why they are healthier and happier. We cannot look at a healthy 75-year-old who has been married for half a century and simply declare that marriage caused the outcome. People capable of sustaining good marriages may be different in important ways.

But that caveat cuts both ways. For decades, our culture has discussed delaying marriage almost entirely in terms of its advantages. Finish your education. Establish your career. Become financially independent. Travel. Find yourself. Date widely so you know exactly what you want. Only then, once everything else is safely in place, should you consider settling down. There are perfectly sensible reasons behind some of that advice. What we almost never discuss is what we may lose by postponing marriage. Years inside a good marriage are themselves something of value, and they cannot be recovered later.

And that brings me to something the marriage literature makes very difficult to ignore: marriage itself appears to run in families.

Marriage Runs in Families

Robert and I did not come from families in which marrying young was particularly unusual. More importantly, we came from families in which marriage lasted. Looking back through the generations we know about, younger marriage was common, and divorce was rare. That pattern extends back at least two or three generations in both of our families. It turns out that this may matter considerably more than I had realized.

One of the most interesting studies comes from Paul Amato and Danelle DeBoer, who used national longitudinal data covering two generations to examine the transmission of divorce from parents to children. Parental divorce approximately doubled the odds that the children’s own marriages would eventually end in divorce. But the more revealing finding came when the researchers looked at the quality of the parents’ marriages before divorce. Children whose parents had troubled marriages but stayed together did not show the same elevated divorce risk. Even more surprisingly, the intergenerational transmission of divorce was strongest when parents who divorced had reported relatively low levels of marital discord beforehand (indicating a lack of commitment to the marriage in the first place). That led the researchers toward an explanation that goes beyond simply learning good or bad relationship skills from our parents. What may be passed from one generation to the next is also the level of commitment to marriage itself, including what we believe marriage requires of us when it becomes difficult and where we place the threshold at which leaving becomes acceptable.

That does not mean children should be taught that every marriage must survive violence, abuse or truly intolerable circumstances. It does suggest that children learn something profound from watching what their parents do when a marriage is merely difficult, disappointing or unhappy for a period of time. They learn whether marriage is understood primarily as a source of personal fulfillment or also as an obligation extending across decades, through circumstances that neither spouse could have anticipated on the wedding day. Perhaps most importantly, they learn whether unhappiness itself is considered sufficient reason to leave. That understanding of marriage may be every bit as important as the communication skills and conflict-resolution techniques that receive so much attention in modern relationship advice.

Marriage timing itself also appears to travel through families. A large multigenerational Dutch study found that parents’ ages at marriage predicted when their children married, and even grandparents’ marriage ages independently predicted those of their grandchildren. That should probably not surprise us. Families transmit culture. They teach children, explicitly and implicitly, when adulthood begins, what constitutes readiness for marriage, whether marriage should precede children, what qualities matter in choosing a husband or wife, and what obligations come with making that choice. What travels through generations may therefore be much more than an age at marriage. Families transmit whether people marry, when they marry, whom they marry, what they expect from marriage, and perhaps how readily they are willing to leave it.

There is an interesting political echo of this in contemporary America. Republicans are considerably more likely than Democrats to be married, a difference that persists even after accounting for age, education, race and some measures of religion. A much larger divide is over whether people marry in the first place. Democrats tend not to marry compared to Republicans.

Gallup has also found striking differences in attitudes toward the institution itself: Republican parents were much more likely than Democratic parents to say that marriage strengthens commitment and to strongly hope that their children eventually marry. I don’t think the interesting conclusion is that Republicans are somehow inherently better at marriage. The data don’t show that. What they do suggest is that belief in marriage itself is culturally transmitted, and today that belief is distributed differently across American political and social groups.

This begins to make Robert’s and my ages at marriage look somewhat less like outliers. We were 18 and 19, but we were not two young people inventing marriage from scratch. Both of us came from families where people married young and stayed married, and from generations in which marriage was understood as a normal part of becoming an adult rather than something to be postponed until every other part of life had been completed. We each brought that history into our own marriage. The number 18 tells you how old I was. It tells you almost nothing about the culture of marriage that came with me.

Israel and why that matters

This was one of the things I found myself thinking about during our recent trip to Israel. Israel is an unusual country in many ways, but what struck me was not simply that Israelis have more children. It was how normal family life still seemed to be. Young couples marry, children arrive, often several of them, and family is not treated as something that begins only after every other personal ambition has been completed. Children were everywhere. So were grandparents, cousins, siblings and extended families. Family was not an interruption of adult life. It was adult life.

The demographic numbers bear out what we saw. Israel has the highest fertility rate in the developed world, at roughly three children per woman, and this is not simply a phenomenon of the ultra-Orthodox. Secular and traditionally observant Jewish Israelis also have considerably more children than their counterparts in Europe or the United States. Israelis also tend to marry and begin families younger. Yet Israel consistently performs very well in international measures of life satisfaction. That does not prove that children, early marriage, or large families cause happiness. But it certainly complicates the modern Western assumption that happiness is produced by delaying marriage and children while maximizing education, career, income, travel and personal freedom.

Nor is Israel some inexplicable cultural outlier. India, despite being vastly poorer and culturally very different, also retains much stronger norms around marriage, children and extended family than most of the West. Marriage generally occurs at a younger age, family obligations remain substantial, and multigenerational relationships still matter. The details are very different, but the larger point is the same: much of the world has not accepted the Western idea that independence from family obligations is necessarily the highest form of adulthood.

What I noticed in Israel was something harder to capture in statistics. Large families require responsibility. Children force adults to stop organizing every decision around themselves. Marriage does the same thing. You have people who depend upon you, obligations that cannot simply be abandoned when they become inconvenient, and a future that extends beyond your own career or happiness at that particular moment. Perhaps some of what we now describe as the burden of marriage and children is actually part of their value.

I came home wondering again whether the United States has the equation backward. We tell young people to postpone marriage and children until they have constructed a satisfying life. But perhaps, for many people, marriage, children, responsibility and the decades spent building something larger than themselves are precisely how a satisfying life is constructed.

The Culture of Marriage

This is why I increasingly wonder whether we have mistaken a cultural variable for an age variable. When researchers find that Americans who marry at 19 divorce more often than those who marry at 27, some portion of that difference may indeed be age and maturity. But “married at 19” also carries information about family background, education, religion, pregnancy, socioeconomic status, attitudes toward divorce, the kind of person chosen as a spouse, and whether the marriage is surrounded by people who expect it to succeed. In a culture where marrying at 19 is unusual, those factors become tangled together. In a culture where marrying young is normal, as it remains in some of the communities we saw in Israel, the meaning of the variable changes completely.

Perhaps the missing variable is something much harder to enter into a spreadsheet: a culture of marriage. It includes the marriages we watched growing up, the values we were taught, the kind of spouse we learned to look for, the expectations we bring about children and fidelity, the role of religion and extended family, and the degree to which we regard marriage as permanent. None of these guarantees a good marriage, and some marriages absolutely should end. But taken together, they create the environment in which a marriage either has roots or does not.

This may also explain why so many predictors of marital stability are interlinked. People tend to marry others with similar religious beliefs, educational backgrounds, family histories, political, and cultural values. A young couple who share those things may therefore be very different from another young couple of precisely the same age who do not. The question is no longer simply whether two people are old enough to marry. It is whether they understand marriage in roughly the same way and whether they have chosen someone who does too.

Perhaps that is what the age-at-marriage statistic cannot tell us. Nineteen tells us when the marriage began. It tells us remarkably little about what that marriage was built upon.

Have We Delayed Marriage, or Delayed Adulthood?

There is a larger cultural question buried in all of this. Over the past several decades, Americans have steadily delayed marriage, but we have also delayed almost every other marker of adulthood. The modern prescription is familiar: finish college, perhaps go to graduate school, establish a career, become financially independent much later, travel, surround yourself with friends of the same gender, discover yourself, figure out precisely who you are and what you want, and only then consider marriage. This rests on an assumption that is rarely examined: that we must become fully formed adults individually before we can successfully become adults together.

Robert and I followed almost the opposite path. At 18 and 19, we certainly weren’t fully formed adults. We didn’t establish two separate lives and then figure out how to merge them. We grew up together. We went through college and graduate school together, struggled financially together, built careers together, raised children together, moved, failed, succeeded, changed direction and changed ourselves. There were certainly disadvantages to starting with so little money and so little experience, but there was also something valuable about building rather than merging our lives. Neither of us arrived with decades of established habits, separate households, financial systems, and expectations that the other somehow had to fit into. We learned how to be adults at the same time that we learned how to be married.

This was one of the things that struck me after our recent trip to Israel. For many young Israelis, adulthood is not organized into a neat series of boxes to be checked one at a time. They serve in the military or national service, study, work, marry and have children, often with those stages overlapping. A 23-year-old Israeli may be young chronologically, but may also have spent several years in an institution where other people depended upon him or her, followed by university, work and marriage. Marriage and children are not necessarily treated as rewards that arrive after every other component of adulthood has been completed. They are part of becoming an adult.

That makes me wonder whether we have been asking the wrong question about young marriage. The question isn’t whether Americans should all start marrying at 19. Obviously, they shouldn’t, and many 19-year-olds are nowhere near ready to make that commitment. The more interesting question is why so many of them aren’t ready, and whether postponing marriage is actually producing that readiness or merely postponing the expectation of adulthood itself. If responsibility, work, service, commitment, and being accountable to other people are part of what makes someone ready for marriage, perhaps those are the things we should be cultivating earlier rather than simply waiting for another birthday.

Maybe a bigger issue is the infantilization of young adults. This cultural practice has led to a whole generation of people who aren’t able to form stable relationships or hold down responsible jobs.

We have spent decades delaying marriage partly on the assumption that more years as a single person will make people better prepared for it. But independence is not the only skill marriage requires. Marriage also requires interdependence: compromise, sacrifice, obligation, patience and the willingness to put another person’s interests alongside your own. Those qualities do not necessarily appear automatically at 27 or 30. Like most adult capacities, they are learned by being expected and practiced. And maybe we need to expect more from our children, not less.

So perhaps the provocative question isn’t “Should young people marry earlier?” It is something more fundamental: Have we delayed marriage because young people are not ready for adulthood, or have young people become less ready for adulthood because we keep delaying the expectation that they become adults?

The Wedding: Community Versus Consumption

There is one small study that fits rather nicely into this larger story. Two Emory economists, Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo Mialon, examined more than 3,000 Americans and looked at whether the amount spent on the engagement ring and wedding was associated with the length of the marriage. The results were almost the opposite of what the wedding industry might have us believe. Spending more on the ring or wedding did not predict a more durable marriage. In fact, the greater the spending, the shorter the marriage duration.

But there was another finding that I find interesting. Having more people attend the wedding was associated with a lower risk of divorce. Marriage has historically been more than a private contract between two people. When parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, churches, and communities are witnesses to the commitment, they remain invested in it long after the cake has been eaten and the photographs have been put away.

Increasingly, young adults are encouraged to think about family relationships in terms of personal fulfillment, boundaries and, when those relationships become difficult, estrangement. Sometimes cutting off a parent is entirely justified; abusive and genuinely destructive families exist. But there is an important difference between escaping abuse and adopting the broader idea that difficult family relationships are disposable.

When adult children sever themselves from parents, grandparents, siblings, churches and the communities in which they were raised, they may also be severing themselves from precisely the support structure that traditionally surrounded a young marriage. A mother-in-law who occasionally drives you crazy may also be the person who takes the children when your marriage is under strain. A father whose advice you don’t particularly want may be the person who tells his son to go home and work things out with his wife. Extended families can certainly create conflict inside marriages, but healthy ones can also provide practical help, perspective, accountability and continuity when two exhausted young people need it most.

Furthermore, if one considers relationships to be temporary or replaceable, then marriage also tends to be seen as temporary.

Perhaps what mattered wasn’t how much money was invested in the wedding, but how many people were invested in the marriage. We have turned weddings into increasingly elaborate exercises in conspicuous consumption (“potlatching” is one anthropologic term applied to this type of behavior), while marriage itself has become increasingly private, and at the same time we have begun weakening many of the family and community relationships that once surrounded it. Yet the evidence we have been looking at keeps pointing in the opposite direction: toward families, shared values, religion, social networks, and communities that reinforce the idea that marriage matters to people beyond the two individuals in it. And that brings me to the question I keep coming back to: if a culture of marriage really can be passed from one generation to the next, how do we make sure we pass it on?

What Do We Teach Our Children?

Which brings me to what may be the most important question of all. Parents spend enormous amounts of time and money preparing their children for college and careers. They help them choose schools, study for entrance exams, write résumés, prepare for interviews, and think carefully about what they want to do for a living. Yet choosing a spouse may have a far greater effect on their happiness, health, finances, children, and ultimately the entire course of their lives. Strangely, we spend remarkably little time preparing them to make that choice.

Perhaps, as parents and families, we need to spend more time teaching our children what makes a good marriage and what to look for in a husband or wife. Attraction matters. Love certainly matters. But so do character, compatibility, shared values, and the ability to make and keep a commitment. Just as importantly, we need to teach our children how to become good spouses themselves: why responsibility matters, why promises matter, why compromise and forgiveness are necessary, and why honoring a commitment can sometimes mean putting another person’s needs ahead of your own.

Young adults also need to know how to evaluate the person they are considering marrying. Do they share the same fundamental beliefs about children, fidelity, money, religion, and family? Is this person honest and responsible? Does he work hard? How does she behave when angry, disappointed, or under stress? Can he admit when he is wrong? Can she forgive? Is this someone whose character you trust enough to build a life with? And what did marriage look like in the family in which this person was raised? These aren’t particularly romantic questions, but they become extraordinarily important once the wedding is over.

And perhaps there is one question young couples almost never ask directly enough: under what circumstances does the person you are considering marrying believe that a marriage should end? Two people can love each other deeply and still enter marriage with completely different definitions of what the promise they are making actually means.

Families also have a role here, and perhaps we have become too reluctant to say so. The modern expectation that parents should politely keep quiet while a son or daughter makes one of the most consequential decisions of a lifetime is rather peculiar. Parents know their children. They have decades more experience watching people make both good and terrible choices, and they can sometimes see character flaws, incompatibilities, or warning signs that someone deeply in love simply cannot. More importantly, parents and grandparents can teach their children, long before that choice arrives, what qualities actually matter in a spouse, and model those qualities in their own marriages.

Ultimately, perhaps that is how a culture of marriage survives. It is not passed down through lectures about marriage nearly as effectively as it is through example. Children watch whether their parents remain loyal when life becomes difficult, whether they forgive, whether they sacrifice for one another, whether they speak about each other with respect, and whether marriage is treated as something larger than the happiness of either person on a particular day. They learn what a husband and wife look like by watching the husband and wife who raised them. And when the time comes to choose someone for themselves, perhaps the greatest gift we can give them is not simply the desire to marry, but the ability to recognize someone who understands marriage in much the same way.

So perhaps the question isn’t “How old should our children be before they marry?”

It is: “Have we taught them what marriage is, and will they recognize someone who was taught the same thing as a potential life partner?”

JGM/RWM

This essay began with a simple question about whether marrying young really increases the risk of divorce, and, as so often happens around here, that question turned into several days of digging through demographic studies, longitudinal datasets and research on everything from parental divorce to religion, politics, wedding costs and Israeli fertility. That kind of research takes time, but it is also why we write here. The interesting story is often buried underneath the statistic everyone already “knows.”

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