The culture of marriage

I’m sure believing that marriage (sealing) is required for exaltation factors in.

Look at the ordinance of baptism. People believe baptism is required to get into heaven so some people started baptizing infants to ensure that base was covered. The sooner the better because salvation is on the line.

For the record, I have heard the term “wifing” and “wifing her up” primarily outside of BYU and LDS culture. It’s a common term with Christians outside of our faith. I have also heard “Peeing in the same pool” mainly refer to dating those who attend your same class, or who are neighbors, or who are co-workers. Dating someone in your ward can make things awkward if you break up… but at BYU YSA wards, there is a strong push to get people dating and married within that ward.

I think the strong push for marriage stems from people getting married later and later in life, while having sexual experiences younger and younger. The US culture is also strongly pushing for individualism, as well as careers over parenthood. Marriage is often strongly romanticized, and being head over heals passionate, where the stars align, and you know and understand each other perfectly without even trying.

The philospher Hegel spoke of a process he called, “the dialectic”. Alain De Botton describes it much better then I can in his video Why Hegel knew there would be days like these. To greatly simplify it, societal progress does not occur in a liniar fasion; rather, it works like the pendulum of a clock. When one societal prinicple is seeen to be “inadequate”, society seems to strongly push too far in the opposite direction. And then, when the new paradigm is discovered to be too far in the wrong direction, it again swings back too far. I assume this is what we see happening with “marriage” at BYU.

My question: Is it bad to marry young? What is the downside if they find someone they are in love with and are willing to figure things out as they go along? By waiting longer…isn’t someone just adding new variables to a situation, not really getting a more sure answer on who is going to be right to be married to in a lifetime full of changes?

I fully agree with the premise behind these questions. But I think a lot of modern ideologies are in conflict with marriage as a whole. Because of this many approach marriage with very selfish, unrealistic expectations.This causes lower marriage rates, and higher rates of divorce, which in turn confirms and solitifies those expectations.

So, for me, it’s a matter of maturity….I think there is also a need for the person to have the social skills to be able to resolve conflict effectively….and this is something that develops with age, some sooner, some later.

Agree. More maturity is better. But how much is “enough”? And as you said…some sooner, some later…which makes the point that some 19 year olds are more ready than some 28 year olds. So, waiting longer isn’t always the best advice I give my kids. Finding the right situation is best, age is one factor, of many. You can’t always plan for the opportunities that come at different times.

Bill Gates didn’t finish Harvard when the opportunity was right for him to seize the opportunity, even if perhaps it was a bit before he was ready to do so. The timing was right, and he grew into it from there.

Secondly, self-aware at 21 will not necessarily apply to same person at 35 or 45 or 55, no matter how self-aware they were in the past. People change over time. You can’t necessarily look back and say “I should have known this would have happened” or “if we were engaged for 2 years instead of 6 months we would have learned enough to know if the marriage will work before making a commitment.”

Thirdly, trying to figure it out on your own can be limiting. My oldest married a great RM who is the kindest, most hard-working and patient guy I know. He has certainly helped my daughter learn more about herself and help her become self-aware. She has really matured since being married. I am glad she didn’t wait too long once she found the right guy. She perhaps wasn’t fully mature or self-aware…but she was enough to know he was right for her as she was. She is much better off now that she is married with him as a partner as they keep maturing together. I couldn’t be prouder of her direction in life.

I don’t disagree with the point that rushing into it can be risky, and more maturity and preparation is great…I just think perhaps people too quickly give young mormon couples a bad wrap when I think there are so many variables at play, that I’m not sure it is any better or worse for my kids to get married young to a great person, as opposed to waiting.

So…I focus on telling my kids:

1. Expectations should be managed, sexually and emotionally and daily marriage life. But you can never explain to another couple what their personal marriage will be like with so many variables at play…so expectations can only be managed so much, some of it is unique to them no matter how hard you try to manage them.

2. Look for red flags first and don’t shrug them off.

3. Focus on the right person, not the right age or education or bank account balance or other worldly measure. 2 people with love, trust, and commitment can be happy together.

4. All the vetting in the world can’t guarantee you know someone’s heart and how they will act in marriage. There are no guarantees. Even the best business partnerships with experienced and mature professional adults can drastically fail…no matter how smart people are before entering into the partnerships. We can’t be too critical of young optimistic dreamers going to seek their happiness dream just because it ended up not working out. No matter how many times we fail, it is better to try and fail than delay the pleasures of trying best we can. Dream big…and courageously go for it with eyes wide open and give it your best.

5. We should change the narrative on divorce. It isn’t the end of the world to find out it isn’t ever going to work, and you need a reset. It isn’t helpful to be stuck in the past and live with regrets…you just move forward and choose how to deal with it. There are too many factors to think it could have been different if only we waited longer before marrying. Divorce is going to happen half the time…let’s not focus on that, but just focus on pursuing dreams and knowing there are multiple ways that can happen that we don’t need to fear the future, but live in the present best we can, and look to Christ to give us hope all will be ok.

Marriage is often strongly romanticized, and being head over heals passionate, where the stars align, and you know and understand each other perfectly without even trying.

This sounds like my 2nd marriage now. It is so easy…I think God knew it wouldn’t have been good for me to miss out the experience I had on my first marriage. In all honesty, I think there is a good bit of luck involved in finding a person to be happily married to. Some get better fortune than others, it seems. Prescribing all life’s situations to actions or choices we make is egocentric.

Sometimes the universe doesn’t care what you did to prepare…some things just happen, and some things are going to be better when we work for it, but it will rain on the just and unjust alike…so work for it and let go of trying to control the outcome.

When President Uchtdorf said this in Conference:

Many years ago, I was at the Frankfurt Germany Temple when I noticed an elderly couple holding hands. The caring tenderness and affection they showed to each other warmed my heart.

I’m not completely sure why this scene affected me so profoundly. Perhaps it was the sweetness of the love these two people shared for one another—a compelling symbol of perseverance and commitment. It was clear that this couple had been together for a long time and their affection for one another was still alive and strong.

…I thought to myself…

They are either an elderly couple holding hands from a long time being together and being love…or maybe these 2 are in their second marriages…happy as can be to be older in life and finally found their true love. Can we really assume which it is?

There are many scenarios where people find happy marriages, or happy lives with or without marriage.

There are no guarantees. Marry young, marry older, don’t get married … we all work to find our happiness in life. There are many paths.

I think my kids are better off making their choices relaxed, happy, and hopeful with following their heart. They have my support. I trust them to follow their heart and let their soul be their pilot. And I’ll be there for them when it isn’t all they hoped it would be.

They should prepare enough. But I can’t tell them what “enough” is. They have to decide that. Most mormons do a pretty good job at family.

Just a few things to add. Thanks, Ray, for those stats. Those are very interesting.

One of our favorite stories is the 24 hour period when my oldest son (age 18 at the time) was getting set up at BYU as a freshman. At dinner in AZ, the waitress offered him a kids’ menu. Then, the Costco in Provo asked if he needed a supp card for his wife. When we told that story on FB, people kept saying ‘That’s Provo for you!’

I guess I have a few opinions on this. 1) I think getting married too young is a bad idea generally, but what is too young differs by person. People have to live with their own choices and clean up their own messes. 2) I am strongly against discouraging women (or not encouraging women) to finish their education or serve missions in favor of getting married. To me, that’s setting up women to fail in life. They can make their own choices, but encouraging them to do things that will make them have less control over their own financial security is reckless, IMO.

We should care about their future, and that doesn’t mean just getting them pregnant at the first sign of fertility. We do a very poor job encouraging women in this church to be able to be financially independent which leads to some of them being abused, not able to divorce, or reduced to poverty.

One aspect of the marriage culture is that we start thinking marriage compatibility right from the start. Dating becomes less about having fun and more about finding the one. There are both advantages and disadvantages to that.

I have regular conversations with my daughter who is in Utah and BYU-P right now. I am amazed at how strong the “get married” culture is…it wouldn’t surprise me if the average age of Mormons getting married is younger than the population at large. This is due to this strong marriage culture.

Where does this come from? The fact that premarital sex is not allowed, so people tend to tie the knot early to they can get on with our North American mating rituals? BY’s statement “the unmarried man is a menace to society”? The eternal marriage concept? Talks from GA’s I’m not familiar with?

There’s no doubt that there is a noticeable difference in the average ages that active LDS Church members get married compared to the outside world, for example in the leaked video about young single adults (2008) they said the average marriage ages for members that were married in the temple were 24 for men and 23 for women compared to 27 for LDS men and 25 for LDS women married outside the temple. And the average marriage ages in the US were reportedly 29 for men and 27 for women by 2014. I think the focus on getting married as soon as possible in the LDS culture is largely due to the Church currently depending so much on members getting married to another active member as a way to effectively retain followers whereas those that are single for very long or are married to a non-Mormon or inactive member are much more likely to fall away permanently.

So some of this is deliberately pushed by Church leaders like Ballard, Hales, mission presidents, etc. but it looks like some of it is just a by-product of Church members seeing other active Church members getting engaged and married relatively quickly after missions (or graduating from high school for young women) and picking up the idea that this is just the acceptable way to do things if you are LDS. And the effect is compounded even more in environments like BYU, student wards, etc. In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons Church leaders are happy to spend so much money on funding BYU because it is basically a place where LDS students can go as young adults and typically come out already married or engaged to another active member and well on their way to a lifetime of commitment to the Church barring some major derailment.