I was legally married at 16. Yes, I regret it! NO, I would never recommend marrying young! Every single couple I know that married out of highschool are now divorced! Love and Romantic relationships can wait! Live life, Have fun, Explore! If a bf/gf is a lot of work, Imagine a marriage! It’s a lot. Casually friend date, Always keep your options open. Variety is the spice of life! Treat yourself like an exclusive club, Not everyone is permitted entry. What you want for yourself and from someone when you’re young will not always be what you want as you grow older. The best investment you’ll ever make is in yourself.
I think I was 25? I would recommend waiting a few years. Or maybe regardless, waiting to have kids until you’re at least 30. Just give yourself some time to understand yourself better before becoming a mom to a whole ass child.
I got married at 24 and we are still happily married 20 years later. We dated for 5 years and lived together for 2 of those before we got married. I was 18/almost 19 when we met.
Do I have any regrets? Absolutely none, it was the best decision I ever made in my life. A strong, happy marriage to a man who is a fantastic husband and father has made my life better in so many ways.
Would I recommend getting married under 25 to other people? Not necessarily, I think there was a lot of luck involved in meeting such a great partner for me so early in life. But I was old enough to know what I was doing and I had a pretty good idea of how things were going to go. Sometimes when you know, you know.
Married at 24. Don’t regret a thing but we dated for a long time & lived together for a long time so we knew each other really well. He’s the best and I’d do it over again in a heartbeat <3
I got married once at 24 (meeting at 22) and once at 34 (meeting at 32 and 34). Both marriages did not work out. The one that happened at 24 honestly was a better match than the one that I got into at 34, but life throws curveballs sometimes.
The pros to the younger marriage is that we grew up together. We didn’t have fights about money and finances and such because when we got together we didn’t have any money and we built things up together. We were figuring out how to be adults together and were not set in our ways yet. We also had a lot of time to take our time having kids because there wasn’t a fertility clock crunch (of course this put me in a bad spot when we divorced at 31).
The cons to the younger marriage were that we were not secure in our careers and identities yet, and neither of us was ready to compromise in a mature way that needed to happen for us to make it in the long term. We both needed to see what we were capable of, and this drove a wedge when we needed to overcome some serious conflict.
The marriage I got into when I was older had more conflict from the beginning. Since I was older, there was a lot less time to get to know each other before the question about if/when we were going to try to have kids happened, which took him by surprise. We also both had lived over a decade of adult life apart and we had a lot of set ways on how to do things, financial and otherwise. I also find a lot of men who are still single in their mid-late 30s and 40s have a lot of arrested development going on.
Having watched a lot of people, I think it’s sort of idiosyncratic which marriages work and which don’t in terms of the personalities of both parties and how much work they put into building the relationship. I have friends who have been together since high school/college/early 20s who are still going strong and grew up together in a beautiful way, and marriages like that that fell apart because they grew apart. Some marriages that happen in the 30s and 40s are stronger because people know what they want and are more mature about communicating and navigating conflict, and sometimes people panic and settle because they want families before it’s too late. It doesn’t seem terribly related to the age they met each other, TBH.
I wouldn’t recommend it without real and honest communication. Everyone changes as they get older, whether you want to or not. The trick is growing together and giving each other the space to do so.
But I don’t regret it at all. Edit wve been married20 years and ties the knot at 24 and 25, which is pretty young these days
I wish we had squared away more things individually. It’s easier to make decisions for yourself than with a partner or child.
If i had waited 1 year. Things would have been so different just based on our living situation. And if I would have waited until I was 25 i probably would have married someone else completely and gotten more of my life together and been more mature and more ready when i had my first kid.
You learn so much in your 20s. You grow up. You try so many things. If you’re married you have someone’s opinion you have to consider all the time.
I got married at 22 and I don’t have any regrets. We’ve been married 28 years. My husband and I did what was best for us and what made sense for us. I have two daughters getting married next year. One is 24 and one is 27 and I’m not worried about either one of them. They have good heads on their shoulders and they’re marrying excellent partners with good heads on their shoulders. My 20 year old son has been with his girlfriend for almost 4 years and I’m glad that they aren’t planning to get engaged/married until about 26. He needs those 5-6 years to mature. So it comes down to the individual people or couples as to whether I recommend getting married young.
I got married at 21, he was 23. We got to grow up together, mature and turn into adults. Most couples just celebrate 5/10 years. We’ve been married 15, together 17. It’s an absolute gift to be able to spend such a long time with my favorite person. When I think about it- some people can get so little with each other. We are truly spending our lives together.
That being said, we were not high school sweethearts, had previous relationships. Tbh I think “early marriages” don’t work out a lot of the times when the couple are reached others firsts/onlys. Never looked up statistics, just people around me.
I will be vehemently be advising my daughters against it.
We truly grow too deeply and widely to have an inkling at that young age of HOW we will.
Its not a terrible thing.
We are supposed to grow.
It can just sometimes be apart and its so very hard to find your way ‘back’ if thats even possible by the time you realize you have.
We didn’t get married until very recently but we have been together since I was 22 and bought a house together when I was 25. It’s been over a decade and I don’t regret it at all. I will say that by 22 I had had a good number of relationships so I knew what I wanted.
I’ve been with my partner since 20 (he’s 5 years older), it’s been almost 20 years. We’re not married though! He’s lovely and I feel like we’ve grown together.
I got married when I was 20, had graduated from college but I grew up very sheltered which probably washed the college out a bit. Been married for 18 years now and I’m so happy that I’m with my husband. We both immediately felt like we were meant to be together and our life together has been so gratifying- we’ve both learned a ton from each other and the decision to get married really set the course for the rest of our lives, which is exciting and fun even through the ups and downs.
That said, I feel like there was a lot of luck involved because I still had so much growing up to do and our backgrounds were very different. I would do it over again, even without knowing how it would turn out, but I don’t know that I would recommend it to other women without a significant amount of caution. And especially with the declining quality of the dating pool overall these days for women.
I think my overall feeling about marrying young is that it feels very high risk, high reward. Finding your partner for life early and getting to build from the ground up so to speak for me had its own unique benefits and really gave me a best friend that I’ve been able to count on for almost two decades now. But it didn’t have to go that way, and there have been probably 2-3 years along the way where things were very challenging and the relationship looked less certain- and yeah most of that time occurred earlier in the marriage when we were both younger. We’re late 30s/mid 40s now and these past few years have definitely been my favorite of the marriage.. partly the benefit of knowing each other so well from the length of the marriage but also partly the benefit of being older and wiser.
So no, no regrets, but I would tell any woman looking to get married young to proceed with a lot of caution.
I got married for the first time at 24. The pluses: it was good for 5 years; we were friends, we traveled together, overall, we had fun until close to the end.
The downside is that because we were so young we were emotionally illiterate. None of us knew how to verbalize what we were feeling. And when it got hard, we didn’t know enough about psychology and therapy to realize that therapy would have helped.
I think marrying young is fun as long as things are good. But when they get difficult, I think you likely are under equipped to deal with it. Unless you’re willing to entertain the idea of therapy and learning more interpersonal skills.
Married at 22 and still happy 26 years later. However, he is a really good man and I had lots of life experience prior. Lots of travel, got my education, plenty of time partying and socializing. Neither of us have any regrets – we talk about it sometimes.
Lived together before marriage so we knew what we were getting into.
My mother loves my husband and our families get along great. It all plays together.
I got married at 22, we’ve met when we were 20. We really love each other, we had ups and downs, specially when we were around 27-29, but because we changed so much during that time and it was a stressful time for both of us professionally. We got into a point where we sat down and discussed if our relationship was worth saving or if we should split. We decided that we did loved each other and we would figure it out what was happening. We are strong now (we are 36) and we have a toddler now.
I absolutely love him, he is my best friend, the first person I want to talk in the morning, the one I share funny videos, and good news, the one person I know I can be vulnerable because I know he will take care of my needs.
I would recommend people getting married young? Not necessarily. I would say that in your 20s you change a lot. But I think it depends on the person you are getting married. You can change it together and you can change apart. You can have a person that will help you grow, and you can have a person that will weight you down. And this can happens at any age.
I’ve got lucky I’ve met the love of my life at 20yo. But seeing everyone around me, having a good relationship is not necessarily a matter of age, is what you accept and expects of your relationship, and if you married the right partner or not
Young-ish? Met at 20, married at 25. 16 years later, no regrets. It’s great being with someone who’s been there at all the stages of getting older. We’re both very different than when we met though so it was definitely a gamble that we ended up growing in the same direction. I don’t recommend it or recommend against it. Emotionally it wouldn’t have been any different to wait a few years but marriage is a practical choice as well and with insurance and property being complicated for singles I personally had no reason to wait – I don’t think breaking up while unmarried would be any less complicated with those things in play than if we had ended up divorced young.
I met my husband when I was 19. 8 months later we were dating, 8 months after that engaged, 8 months after that we got married. I was 22 and he was 23. Both pretty intense Christians at the time, I was a virgin till our wedding night, he had had one long term girlfriend & sex partner prior.
Purity culture fucked us around a bit, but I got over my jealousy/insecurity and we’ve had a pretty stellar sex life ever since.
We had a VERY intensional relationship from the beginning, and we’re both very self-aware people. About the only regret I have is that we didn’t kiss until our wedding day – mostly because we had a couple PERFECT first kiss moments that we “resisted”, but if the choice was between being insanely strict or carrying shame and guilt over sex due to my upbringing, I still choose the awkward first kiss at wedding. I’m not raising my kids with purity culture, so I won’t be advocating for waiting to that degree.
We’ve been married for 15 years this year. Have two boys, 12 and 9. I wouldn’t change a thing.
That being said, I think our neurospicy intensity and our mutual obsessions with self-improvement has been a HUGE factor in the success of our marriage. We have talked through the difficult and awkward shit every time.
Up until I went off my meds temporarily last year to regain the ability to orgasm (thanks ssris) I had NEVER said a cutting word to him in anger. He has never lost his temper with me. Now it’s happened once, and I will do everything in my power not to hurt him like that again. (Back on a better cocktail of meds again).
I recently read Bell Hooks “All about Love”, and I truely believe our marriage fits her definition of what true love looks like.
I am so so thankful, but I am SO aware of friends who also got married around the same time who are STRUGGLING.
Married at 24. Husband was 23. We grew together, put each other through school, scraped together money, bought a house, had a family. Going strong for 30 years.
We were both 21 when we got married. Still very happily together now at 44. Absolutely do not regret it. Best choice I ever made.
What I recommend is doing what you want. You don’t need the approval of strangers for your life choices, nor do you need to heed their disapproval.
If it’s what you want and you know it’s right for you, don’t listen to shamers and haters and insecure people who judge others and do it. If it’s not what you want and it’s not right for you, same thing except don’t do it. Also maybe try to not judge and shame others for making the choice that’s right for them instead of the choice you would have made.
I married my husband at 24, and we are still happily married 19 years later. I do not regret it. Having said that, my experience in no way makes the question “would you recommend it?” a straightforward one to answer, and literally no one can answer it with a “yes” and actually have any idea what they’re talking about. It worked well for me, with the specific person that I married. Had I married a different person at 24, who knows? There are so many factors that go into whether marriage is a good idea, and age is just one of them.
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I got married at 17, before I even knew who I am. Do not recommend. My ex (20 at the time) and I grew into incompatible adults.
What’s considered young? I got married at 26, and don’t regret it, but I know these days that may be considered young.
I got married at 21, no regrets. But we just knew, that we were in it for the long haul. As we’ve grown we have changed but still work well together.
I was legally married at 16. Yes, I regret it! NO, I would never recommend marrying young! Every single couple I know that married out of highschool are now divorced! Love and Romantic relationships can wait! Live life, Have fun, Explore! If a bf/gf is a lot of work, Imagine a marriage! It’s a lot. Casually friend date, Always keep your options open. Variety is the spice of life! Treat yourself like an exclusive club, Not everyone is permitted entry. What you want for yourself and from someone when you’re young will not always be what you want as you grow older. The best investment you’ll ever make is in yourself.
I think I was 25? I would recommend waiting a few years. Or maybe regardless, waiting to have kids until you’re at least 30. Just give yourself some time to understand yourself better before becoming a mom to a whole ass child.
Married high school sweetheart at 23 and divorced by 30.
I got married at 24 and we are still happily married 20 years later. We dated for 5 years and lived together for 2 of those before we got married. I was 18/almost 19 when we met.
Do I have any regrets? Absolutely none, it was the best decision I ever made in my life. A strong, happy marriage to a man who is a fantastic husband and father has made my life better in so many ways.
Would I recommend getting married under 25 to other people? Not necessarily, I think there was a lot of luck involved in meeting such a great partner for me so early in life. But I was old enough to know what I was doing and I had a pretty good idea of how things were going to go. Sometimes when you know, you know.
Married at 24. Don’t regret a thing but we dated for a long time & lived together for a long time so we knew each other really well. He’s the best and I’d do it over again in a heartbeat <3
I got married at 23 but I married a REALLY good man which I think is rare
I got married once at 24 (meeting at 22) and once at 34 (meeting at 32 and 34). Both marriages did not work out. The one that happened at 24 honestly was a better match than the one that I got into at 34, but life throws curveballs sometimes.
The pros to the younger marriage is that we grew up together. We didn’t have fights about money and finances and such because when we got together we didn’t have any money and we built things up together. We were figuring out how to be adults together and were not set in our ways yet. We also had a lot of time to take our time having kids because there wasn’t a fertility clock crunch (of course this put me in a bad spot when we divorced at 31).
The cons to the younger marriage were that we were not secure in our careers and identities yet, and neither of us was ready to compromise in a mature way that needed to happen for us to make it in the long term. We both needed to see what we were capable of, and this drove a wedge when we needed to overcome some serious conflict.
The marriage I got into when I was older had more conflict from the beginning. Since I was older, there was a lot less time to get to know each other before the question about if/when we were going to try to have kids happened, which took him by surprise. We also both had lived over a decade of adult life apart and we had a lot of set ways on how to do things, financial and otherwise. I also find a lot of men who are still single in their mid-late 30s and 40s have a lot of arrested development going on.
Having watched a lot of people, I think it’s sort of idiosyncratic which marriages work and which don’t in terms of the personalities of both parties and how much work they put into building the relationship. I have friends who have been together since high school/college/early 20s who are still going strong and grew up together in a beautiful way, and marriages like that that fell apart because they grew apart. Some marriages that happen in the 30s and 40s are stronger because people know what they want and are more mature about communicating and navigating conflict, and sometimes people panic and settle because they want families before it’s too late. It doesn’t seem terribly related to the age they met each other, TBH.
I wouldn’t recommend it without real and honest communication. Everyone changes as they get older, whether you want to or not. The trick is growing together and giving each other the space to do so.
But I don’t regret it at all. Edit wve been married20 years and ties the knot at 24 and 25, which is pretty young these days
Wait!
I got married at 22. Baby by 23.
I wish we had squared away more things individually. It’s easier to make decisions for yourself than with a partner or child.
If i had waited 1 year. Things would have been so different just based on our living situation. And if I would have waited until I was 25 i probably would have married someone else completely and gotten more of my life together and been more mature and more ready when i had my first kid.
You learn so much in your 20s. You grow up. You try so many things. If you’re married you have someone’s opinion you have to consider all the time.
I got married at 22 and I don’t have any regrets. We’ve been married 28 years. My husband and I did what was best for us and what made sense for us. I have two daughters getting married next year. One is 24 and one is 27 and I’m not worried about either one of them. They have good heads on their shoulders and they’re marrying excellent partners with good heads on their shoulders. My 20 year old son has been with his girlfriend for almost 4 years and I’m glad that they aren’t planning to get engaged/married until about 26. He needs those 5-6 years to mature. So it comes down to the individual people or couples as to whether I recommend getting married young.
I got married at 18. 100% regret. I had no idea what I was doing and I chose to marry someone that wasn’t a good fit for me.
I got married at 21, he was 23. We got to grow up together, mature and turn into adults. Most couples just celebrate 5/10 years. We’ve been married 15, together 17. It’s an absolute gift to be able to spend such a long time with my favorite person. When I think about it- some people can get so little with each other. We are truly spending our lives together.
That being said, we were not high school sweethearts, had previous relationships. Tbh I think “early marriages” don’t work out a lot of the times when the couple are reached others firsts/onlys. Never looked up statistics, just people around me.
I married young.
24yrs old. (He was 21)
I will be vehemently be advising my daughters against it.
We truly grow too deeply and widely to have an inkling at that young age of HOW we will.
Its not a terrible thing.
We are supposed to grow.
It can just sometimes be apart and its so very hard to find your way ‘back’ if thats even possible by the time you realize you have.
Got married at 23; husband was 23 as well. I don’t regret it. I wish my kids marry young, but it’s important to find a good person first.
We didn’t get married until very recently but we have been together since I was 22 and bought a house together when I was 25. It’s been over a decade and I don’t regret it at all. I will say that by 22 I had had a good number of relationships so I knew what I wanted.
I’ve been with my partner since 20 (he’s 5 years older), it’s been almost 20 years. We’re not married though! He’s lovely and I feel like we’ve grown together.
I got married when I was 20, had graduated from college but I grew up very sheltered which probably washed the college out a bit. Been married for 18 years now and I’m so happy that I’m with my husband. We both immediately felt like we were meant to be together and our life together has been so gratifying- we’ve both learned a ton from each other and the decision to get married really set the course for the rest of our lives, which is exciting and fun even through the ups and downs.
That said, I feel like there was a lot of luck involved because I still had so much growing up to do and our backgrounds were very different. I would do it over again, even without knowing how it would turn out, but I don’t know that I would recommend it to other women without a significant amount of caution. And especially with the declining quality of the dating pool overall these days for women.
I think my overall feeling about marrying young is that it feels very high risk, high reward. Finding your partner for life early and getting to build from the ground up so to speak for me had its own unique benefits and really gave me a best friend that I’ve been able to count on for almost two decades now. But it didn’t have to go that way, and there have been probably 2-3 years along the way where things were very challenging and the relationship looked less certain- and yeah most of that time occurred earlier in the marriage when we were both younger. We’re late 30s/mid 40s now and these past few years have definitely been my favorite of the marriage.. partly the benefit of knowing each other so well from the length of the marriage but also partly the benefit of being older and wiser.
So no, no regrets, but I would tell any woman looking to get married young to proceed with a lot of caution.
I got married for the first time at 24. The pluses: it was good for 5 years; we were friends, we traveled together, overall, we had fun until close to the end.
The downside is that because we were so young we were emotionally illiterate. None of us knew how to verbalize what we were feeling. And when it got hard, we didn’t know enough about psychology and therapy to realize that therapy would have helped.
I think marrying young is fun as long as things are good. But when they get difficult, I think you likely are under equipped to deal with it. Unless you’re willing to entertain the idea of therapy and learning more interpersonal skills.
Married at 22 and still happy 26 years later. However, he is a really good man and I had lots of life experience prior. Lots of travel, got my education, plenty of time partying and socializing. Neither of us have any regrets – we talk about it sometimes.
Lived together before marriage so we knew what we were getting into.
My mother loves my husband and our families get along great. It all plays together.
I got married at 22, we’ve met when we were 20. We really love each other, we had ups and downs, specially when we were around 27-29, but because we changed so much during that time and it was a stressful time for both of us professionally. We got into a point where we sat down and discussed if our relationship was worth saving or if we should split. We decided that we did loved each other and we would figure it out what was happening. We are strong now (we are 36) and we have a toddler now.
I absolutely love him, he is my best friend, the first person I want to talk in the morning, the one I share funny videos, and good news, the one person I know I can be vulnerable because I know he will take care of my needs.
I would recommend people getting married young? Not necessarily. I would say that in your 20s you change a lot. But I think it depends on the person you are getting married. You can change it together and you can change apart. You can have a person that will help you grow, and you can have a person that will weight you down. And this can happens at any age.
I’ve got lucky I’ve met the love of my life at 20yo. But seeing everyone around me, having a good relationship is not necessarily a matter of age, is what you accept and expects of your relationship, and if you married the right partner or not
Young-ish? Met at 20, married at 25. 16 years later, no regrets. It’s great being with someone who’s been there at all the stages of getting older. We’re both very different than when we met though so it was definitely a gamble that we ended up growing in the same direction. I don’t recommend it or recommend against it. Emotionally it wouldn’t have been any different to wait a few years but marriage is a practical choice as well and with insurance and property being complicated for singles I personally had no reason to wait – I don’t think breaking up while unmarried would be any less complicated with those things in play than if we had ended up divorced young.
I met my husband when I was 19. 8 months later we were dating, 8 months after that engaged, 8 months after that we got married. I was 22 and he was 23. Both pretty intense Christians at the time, I was a virgin till our wedding night, he had had one long term girlfriend & sex partner prior.
Purity culture fucked us around a bit, but I got over my jealousy/insecurity and we’ve had a pretty stellar sex life ever since.
We had a VERY intensional relationship from the beginning, and we’re both very self-aware people. About the only regret I have is that we didn’t kiss until our wedding day – mostly because we had a couple PERFECT first kiss moments that we “resisted”, but if the choice was between being insanely strict or carrying shame and guilt over sex due to my upbringing, I still choose the awkward first kiss at wedding. I’m not raising my kids with purity culture, so I won’t be advocating for waiting to that degree.
We’ve been married for 15 years this year. Have two boys, 12 and 9. I wouldn’t change a thing.
That being said, I think our neurospicy intensity and our mutual obsessions with self-improvement has been a HUGE factor in the success of our marriage. We have talked through the difficult and awkward shit every time.
Up until I went off my meds temporarily last year to regain the ability to orgasm (thanks ssris) I had NEVER said a cutting word to him in anger. He has never lost his temper with me. Now it’s happened once, and I will do everything in my power not to hurt him like that again. (Back on a better cocktail of meds again).
I recently read Bell Hooks “All about Love”, and I truely believe our marriage fits her definition of what true love looks like.
I am so so thankful, but I am SO aware of friends who also got married around the same time who are STRUGGLING.
Married at 24. Husband was 23. We grew together, put each other through school, scraped together money, bought a house, had a family. Going strong for 30 years.
We were both 21 when we got married. Still very happily together now at 44. Absolutely do not regret it. Best choice I ever made.
What I recommend is doing what you want. You don’t need the approval of strangers for your life choices, nor do you need to heed their disapproval.
If it’s what you want and you know it’s right for you, don’t listen to shamers and haters and insecure people who judge others and do it. If it’s not what you want and it’s not right for you, same thing except don’t do it. Also maybe try to not judge and shame others for making the choice that’s right for them instead of the choice you would have made.
Got married at 19. We are about to be 30 and I don’t regret it, but it’s definitely not for everyone!
I married my husband at 24, and we are still happily married 19 years later. I do not regret it. Having said that, my experience in no way makes the question “would you recommend it?” a straightforward one to answer, and literally no one can answer it with a “yes” and actually have any idea what they’re talking about. It worked well for me, with the specific person that I married. Had I married a different person at 24, who knows? There are so many factors that go into whether marriage is a good idea, and age is just one of them.