Why the focus on getting married young?

[Anonymous]

Lots of good thoughts here. I think everyone contributed something to my view of this (even Sheldon 😆 ). Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I should point out that there is not a current focus on getting married at an age that can be considered truly young, either historically or even compared to a few decades ago when I was a young adult.

Teenage marriage is not encouraged now, and the change in mission age for young women has moved the average age upward. We still marry younger collectively than the national average in the United States and similar countries, but we actually marry later than the average in quite a few countries – and the average marriage age in the LDS Church now is statistically, significantly higher than it was 30 years ago when I got married.

Also, just for perspective, a young Catholic friend mentioned to me today that she feels some degree of pressure to find a husband. She is a freshman in college and 18-19 years old.

[Anonymous]

Old-Timer wrote:

I should point out that there is not a current focus on getting married at an age that can be considered truly young, either historically or even compared to a few decades ago when I was a young adult…Teenage marriage is not encouraged now, and the change in mission age for young women has moved the average age upward. We still marry younger collectively than the national average in the United States and similar countries, but we actually marry later than the average in quite a few countries – and the average marriage age in the LDS Church now is statistically, significantly higher than it was 30 years ago when I got married…

That’s half the point of the question as far as I’m concerned; it looks like the Church is desperately trying to hold onto and maintain what was the norm 30 or more years ago while making the LDS cutlure increasingly at odds with the current reality. We still have people acting like Church members are an old maid or “menace to society” if they aren’t already married by the time they are 25 while the average marriage age has increased to about 26 for women and 28 for men in the US. And it looks like a significant number of young adults are already ignoring the traditional expectations because recently we have seen Ballard and Hales directly saying that members supposedly shouldn’t delay marriage and Holland specifically telling Institute teachers this is a trend they are concerned with.

So the obvious question here is why the rush? What is so bad about waiting to get married for whatever reasons such as wanting to finish college first? Personally I think a big part of this push is that the Church has come to rely heavily on temple marriage as a way to retain members because it involves making a public commitment to the Church and after that it will be harder for members to change their minds about many of the Church’s teachings because then they will have to worry about what their spouse, in-laws, etc. think about it in addition to their own family. They already closed the gap between living with parents that can keep an eye on and influence their children and missions when many young adults typically fall away from the Church so now the weakest remaining link in the chain is the time between returning from missions and getting married. So it’s no surprise that some Church leaders feel especially anxious about members getting married ASAP as a way to try to secure the future in the Church of these young adults.

[Anonymous]

Quote:

DA wrote : They already closed the gap between living with parents that can keep an eye on and influence their children and missions when many young adults typically fall away from the Church so now the weakest remaining link in the chain is the time between returning from missions and getting married. So it’s no surprise that some Church leaders feel especially anxious about members getting married ASAP as a way to try to secure the future in the Church of these young adults.

Well stated. That is the way I see the situation too.

[Anonymous]

DarkJedi wrote:

I’m in the chastity camp on this one. I think it’s encouraged because of the fear many would break the law of chastity and follow the ways of the world if they’re not married. Mix in some tradition and there you have “get married as soon as you can after your mission and don’t delay having children.” I actually get the first part, although I don’t necessarily agree with it. I don’t get the second part – I see no reason not to wait until you finish college and have a job and are able to support children before having them (and I see no reason to have many children).

I’m a little late on this thread,…but the seeds of my divorce were sown when we had our children so young. I was literally following the advice given so strongly in my lifetime by SWK. Kept all the commandments, had the children IN MARRIAGE too soon, wasn’t ready for the burden, and it started a chain reaction of events that culminated in the marriage becoming a catastrophe.

There is an underlying thing that may have been written about before I saw this thread from DJ,…but I want to mention it. There is solid research that indicates marital satisfaction is inversely proportionate to the number of children you have. As children come into the marriage, the marriage satisfaction decreases. Now, the “family” satisfaction grows, but the marriage will suffer. Because of this, it makes sense why the focus on the church seems to polarized to family, with the idea of marriage being a second (this is my own opinion).

If a couple marries at a young age, like right after marriage, chances are they haven’t dated very much. If they start their children soon after marriage (as has been counseled VERY STRONGLY by guys like SWK [and is still out there in counsels]), then their ability to get to know each other really well is limited–the honeymoon ends VERY QUICKLY.

I think the church focuses so much on the family, they neglect to recognize that family can undermine marriage. Not a good combination.

And, sex was mentioned in this thread as one of the reasons to get married. You have children right off, and the sex suffers. Plain and simple. But, why is that a concern for a bunch of guys who are between 60 and like 90?…who live for the church ONLY?

One more comment not exactly germane to this thread, but it came to mind. In the Moses book, God says: “this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” I don’t like that scripture one bit,..and here is why.

God isn’t working to please and love his wife. He is not working to have a beautiful relationship with her…his entire attention is turned to his children. Generally speaking, we don’t even hear a single thing about MIH. Does she exist? Is she of any value? And, in the church it is a VERY VERY common complaint of men: “My wife doesn’t pay any attention to me. All she does is loose herself in the children.”

Well, why not? The church sais have the children, and then focus on the family. It doesn’t surprise me that there are so many problems happening with marriages out there–it isn’t important. The church and children come first, EVEN if it is necessary to sacrifice the marriage.

My 2 cents.

[Anonymous]

Rob4Hope wrote:

DarkJedi wrote:

I’m in the chastity camp on this one. I think it’s encouraged because of the fear many would break the law of chastity and follow the ways of the world if they’re not married. Mix in some tradition and there you have “get married as soon as you can after your mission and don’t delay having children.” I actually get the first part, although I don’t necessarily agree with it. I don’t get the second part – I see no reason not to wait until you finish college and have a job and are able to support children before having them (and I see no reason to have many children).

I’m a little late on this thread,…but the seeds of my divorce were sown when we had our children so young. I was literally following the advice given so strongly in my lifetime by SWK. Kept all the commandments, had the children IN MARRIAGE too soon, wasn’t ready for the burden, and it started a chain reaction of events that culminated in the marriage becoming a catastrophe…There is solid research that indicates marital satisfaction is inversely proportionate to the number of children you have. As children come into the marriage, the marriage satisfaction decreases…If a couple marries at a young age, like right after marriage, chances are they haven’t dated very much. If they start their children soon after marriage (as has been counseled VERY STRONGLY by guys like SWK [and is still out there in counsels]), then their ability to get to know each other really well is limited–the honeymoon ends VERY QUICKLY…And, sex was mentioned in this thread as one of the reasons to get married. You have children right off, and the sex suffers. Plain and simple. But, why is that a concern for a bunch of guys who are between 60 and like 90?…who live for the church ONLY?

My guess is that most Church leaders view having children as soon as possible sort of like missions with the general attitude that it won’t necessarily be easy but it will supposedly be worth it in the end. They don’t necessarily know that having many young adults rush into marriage before they have much maturity or financial stability based mostly on infatuation and wanting to have sex and then have children right away can easily contribute to eventual divorce or extremely unhappy and unnecessarily stressful marriages or that many people that have sex before marriage and wait a few years to have children are doing just fine and this approach could have actually contributed to them having a happy marriage over the long term because these real life scenarios are completely foreign to their own experience and the Church’s traditional teachings.

None of these guys are divorced and their own background and experience is their primary frame of reference so even if their first/only marriage wasn’t especially successful in terms of the overall satisfaction of both partners they don’t really have anything else to compare it against other than maybe some of them getting re-married late life after their wife dies because it’s all they know based on direct experience. It’s easy for them to give bad advice like this when this is their experience (they were relatively lucky or don’t really know the difference between a tolerable marriage and a relatively good marriage) especially when they don’t have to live with the consequences when this approach ends up being a complete disaster for everyone involved.

In theory even if people have sex before they are married they are no longer “sinning” simply by having sex once they are married so it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard for more of them to come back to Church once they settle down after going through a temporary rebellious phase early in life but in practice that doesn’t seem to happen all that often compared to the number of active members that followed the script of full-time missions followed by temple marriage wire-to-wire. This is what I think Church leaders should look at instead of pushing early marriage as a shortcut to get around the underlying reasons why the Church doesn’t appeal to more people that didn’t follow the tyipcal LDS life script better than it currently does. Seriously, if the Church really made a positive difference then it seems like people shouldn’t need to be married to another active Mormon to stick around more than what we see but instead it seems like it is largely about a sense of obligation at this point.

[Anonymous]

Family Guide:

“…Besides, there is so great a need for consideration of matters other than physical functions (such as finances, religion, child rearing methods, friendships, relatives, career plans, and living arrangements, not to mention planning the wedding itself) that undue attention to sexual information can actually create problems. The whole point of virtuous courtship is to maintain spirituality while learning about each other as persons and putting temporal and mundane matters into proper perspective.”

I cant’ read this without associating the church’s position about “physical functions” as being relegated to “mundane”. And, maintaining spirituality is placed in contrast here to physical functions. Back when this was written, physical feelings and function were the same….to be spiritual, you must not be sexual (the implicit message many hear).

The church is schizophrenic with regards to sexuality. On one side of this thread, many have said you get married because you want to have sex. And the church then sais: “ah,…don’t spend time talking about this,…its mundane.”

Earlier in this article, the counsel of the church is to NOT talk about sexuality with your future spouse–because there are some things you should ONLY talk about AFTER you are married. And then sex messes up marriages and we wonder why?

The model is: “All marriages that are built on the Gospel will be successful”…and yet sexuality and sexual preference are NOT DISCUSSED in the model BECAUSE it is too sacred. But it messes up marriages. I mean, after all, if the gospel is all that is required, lets put a gay man and a lesbian woman together, and hey,…they will have a perfect marriage as long as they obey the gospel, which for them is to do something disgustingly distasteful–as in having children when it feels as repulsive to them as having sex with a man would feel to me.

The church is most definitely in a quandary.

I wish I knew at least 3 things before I got married:

1. I wish I had even a clue that sex was important in marriage. I had no idea at all. I always figured that woman hated sex–because that was the culture the church taught, and what I observed with all the anxious looks when the “s” word was ever said around anyone.

2. I wish I had waited to have my children. I hardly knew my wife, and the honeymoon ended after 2 months, never to be reclaimed.

3. I wish I had dated more, and didn’t feel like I was going to hell for kissing.

Might have changed my life.

But how can you mess with what the church teaches? They speak for God. My FC rolls on as my belief in the “brethren” disintegrates.

[Anonymous]

I was married at 22 after dating before my mission and a year after my mission (knowing each other for 4 years). First child at 24. In debt up to my eyeballs at graduation with 2 kids at 26. 23 years later divorced with 4 kids, 2 oldest kids emancipated and out of the house.

I don’t believe my divorce would have been avoided if I had waited longer to be married or put off having kids. I don’t think you can know what will happen in a marriage ahead of time, and once in it, there is such commitment to make it work that everyone tells you it is work…so you don’t know what is normal marriage problems and what is irreconcilable differences.

If I waited longer, all it would have done was made it so that I was older or the kids were younger by the time the problems got to the point of divorce in my situation. Is that better?

In other words, I don’t see causation of divorce because of young marriage. I think the rest of the world gets married older and has higher divorce rates than temple divorces with young couples. Outside of divorce, I’m not even sure those that stay in marriage and don’t divorce are happier if they waited longer.

I think it is more of a choice you make. You choose your love, and love your choice…and deal with changes as they come.

DevilsAdvocate wrote:

My guess is that most Church leaders view having children as soon as possible sort of like missions with the general attitude that it won’t necessarily be easy but it will supposedly be worth it in the end.

I wonder if that comes from the perspective that with faith and hope and work, you overcome problems as you go…instead of trying to put off things to avoid problems. In case of marriage, I’m not sure you avoid difficulties…so…might as well get on with it, have hope, and learn to love through problems. Since that worked for many of them…and many others…it is probably how they see it to be a wise strategy, especially when families are so important.

[Anonymous]

BIRTH CONTROL AMONG THE MORMONS:

INTRODUCTION TO AN

INSISTENT QUESTION

Dialogue V10 N2.

Lester E. Bush.

Fascinating Article

My father once told me that Joseph Fielding Smith use to teach that unless you were having children, abstinence was the only acceptable option. I thought he was making that up. WOW. Marrying young and having babies WAS the doctrine of the day.

[Anonymous]

Any reference to JFS and birth control is so outdated as to be useless now – except among the uber-orthodox who still follow old teachings over new ones.

I know how wide that net unfortunately is, but it absolutely is outdated.

Also, statistically, the age where divorce skyrockets is below 20. Everything above that is basically steady. The average LDS marriage age is above 20, for men and women.

[Anonymous]

Old-Timer wrote:

Any reference to JFS and birth control is so outdated as to be useless now.

THANK GOODNESS!!!!

But, things JS taught close to 180 years ago are also “outdated?”

Anyway,…these guys used to basically say you were going to hell if you practiced birth control. They spoke with “authority from God”.

This all flies in the face of prophets always speaking the mind and will of God. They spoke from their own understanding and from the time in which they lived, right or wrong.

At a higher level (and I know this is off topic, so my comment will be small), I see growing clashes between the TBM folks who work to harmonize ALL doctrinal teachings, and those who are more liberal and want to be “persuaded with long suffering and meekness” because the edict top down correlated pronouncements no longer work.

[Anonymous]

Rob, nobody here believes prophets and apostles always speak the word of God. It is objectively provable through our scriptural canon that they make mistakes or say things that get changed later through “further light and knowledge”, increased understanding, on-going revelation, whatever.

It’s a dead issue here. Horse is buried. No sticks needed to beat it. Let it go. :thumbup:

[Anonymous]

Rob4Hope:

My grandmother was a daughter of a LDS polygamist family. When she married, one LDS aunt and uncle gave her a contraceptive “salve” as a wedding gift. They also gave her the recipe. Today we would call it a spermicide.

I asked her if it worked. Her reply, ” I only had 3 kids. What do you think?”

There are all kinds of church quotes out there .. And then there is reality.

[Anonymous]

Heber13 wrote:

I was married at 22 after dating before my mission and a year after my mission (knowing each other for 4 years). First child at 24. In debt up to my eyeballs at graduation with 2 kids at 26. 23 years later divorced with 4 kids, 2 oldest kids emancipated and out of the house…I don’t believe my divorce would have been avoided if I had waited longer to be married or put off having kids. I don’t think you can know what will happen in a marriage ahead of time, and once in it, there is such commitment to make it work that everyone tells you it is work…so you don’t know what is normal marriage problems and what is irreconcilable differences…If I waited longer, all it would have done was made it so that I was older or the kids were younger by the time the problems got to the point of divorce in my situation. Is that better?

I agree that waiting longer to get married probably wouldn’t have made that much of a difference in your case if you were going to marry the same person either way. Sure there are no guarantees or ways to predict for sure what will happen twenty years from now but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to at least see some early warning signs that you are headed for trouble and avoid some obvious and unnecessary pitfalls with a little caution and common sense. That’s where I think having some Church members get engaged to practically the first person they meet after their mission and then jump into marriage head first hoping for the best after only few months (or even weeks) is an unnecessary risk because they won’t necessarily see some of the potential problems and incompatibilities in that case the way they generally would if they felt like they didn’t need to get married for a few years and dated more people before getting an idea who they feel is the best one for them. Also I don’t believe there’s any way that getting married much less having children while still in school and/or having low-paying entry level jobs is a very good long-term policy to recommend in general because of the typical unnecessary added stress involved. Sure some people can manage to get by this way and make it work but I don’t see why very many would want to nowadays if they don’t have to and to be honest I think it is irresponsible of the Church to continue push ideas like this so much.

[Anonymous]

Heber13 wrote:

In other words, I don’t see causation of divorce because of young marriage. I think the rest of the world gets married older and has higher divorce rates than temple divorces with young couples. Outside of divorce, I’m not even sure those that stay in marriage and don’t divorce are happier if they waited longer…I think it is more of a choice you make.

I don’t really believe this claim nowadays mostly because I have seen so many people that were married in the temple get divorced and so many non-Mormons and inactive members that are still married. It sounds like there were some misleading statistics reported where some extremely low divorce figures came from counting the cancellation of sealings but that doesn’t necessarily prove much when many Church members don’t bother to request a sealing cancellation when they get divorced and even if they do that doesn’t mean it will be granted. Meanwhile there were some other statistics reported based on surveys that showed divorce rates for Mormons (temple marriage or not) were basically the same as the national average. I’m not sure if it is even possible to find very accurate statistics categorized based on temple marriage versus civil only and marriage age.

Even if the divorce rates for those married in the temple are lower than average not all of these Church members were married “young” and not everyone in the outside world gets married relatively “old.” In fact, there is a segment of non-Mormons and inactive members that were first married at 18-21 that would actually be younger than the typical LDS RMs. Another factor to consider is that maybe some of these marriages don’t end in divorce not because they are especially happy together but simply because of the stigma in the Church, so many LDS women that have no career and have been stay-at-home moms their whole lives so that they are completely dependent on their husband financially, etc. whereas some people that get divorced will actually end up happier overall eventually as a result.

[Author]

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