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  • Seems like 24 is an arbitrary number. Some folks consider themselves "ready" for marriage at 18, some at 40, and some never.

    I think its very subjective and situational.

  • I see a pretty stark difference between people who married young and had kids right away, vs people who married young and enjoyed their time for a while before having kids. The ones who had kids seem weird to me, never got a chance to goof off in their 20s and figure out who they are. The ones who waited feel more normal. But that's just my experience.

    • The ones who had kids seem weird to me, never got a chance to goof off in their 20s and figure out who they are.

      I definitely needed to goof off in my 20s and figure out who I was. But not everybody is like that, and the meme in question suggests it's "weird" to know who you are and not need to goof off.

    • How old are you? No need to be specific this isn’t a creepy question lol just roughly what age are you? Because I don’t think we can make any sort of broad assessment until the people who had kids when they were young have kids out of the house. I know plenty
      of people who are enjoying their 40’s with kids happily going off to college around that time. If you have kids in your early to mid 30’s - assuming you stopped at 35, which isn’t a given - you’re starting to have them out in your mid 50’s. Those are very different times for you, physically, mentally, professionally, etc. even if it doesn’t seem like it.

      I imagine for many in this thread it is too early to be making a final assessment. I think also a lot of people here forget that nobody is thrusting these decisions upon them (except maybe overeager parents who want to be grandparents, in which case they need to back off). Different people have different objectives/goals in life. They aren’t worse off for not doing it your way.

      The strongest marriage I know is my buddy from high school who married his high school sweetheart, right when they graduated college at 21. They just had their 3rd kid at 35 and they’re ecstatic. First was at 22 or so.

      The point is a post like this shows a certain amount of hubris/lack of imagination/lack of exposure to people with different lifestyles and priorities.

      • I just can't imagine being a grandfather at >70... and seeing NOTHING of that generation before I'm doomed to dementia/death.

        My Grandparents were a HUGE part of my life... and knowing that some people don't want to be that positive influence to their grandkids lives is disappointing. Raising kids is a hard thing to do. To not be around when my daughters need the help is something that I refuse to acknowledge as "healthy" just because some numpties on the internet think that everyone should be older than 35 to have kids.

        As it stands, I haven't needed my parents much at all for raising my kids (I was 26 for my oldest, I would have been fine going a bit younger as I was more or less in the same situation). But they're there if something happens (familial fallbacks are great bus factor multipliers.)

        A lot of what I'm reading here sounds like most people seem to think that you should be 100% self-sustaining before you do ANYTHING... and that's just not an answer that works in my brain.

        Edit: This whole premise is actually a really good way to kill generational knowledge. My dad doesn't know nearly the same stuff my grandfather does about the family.

    • This is the main point here, IMO. A child is a huge responsibility and the early 20s is a period of life you're still figuring things out. Culture also plays a role here; where I'm from, people are deciding to live together (without having kids) for a couple of years before formally marrying.

      • Having a kid in your 20s is not for you, but you can’t just assume that that is the case for everyone else.

        I mean, let’s take this post: what is so magical about 24? Why not 25? Why not 23? I imagine the number was pretty arbitrary. It just sounded right to OP.

  • As a rule of thumb I'd agree

    That said, few people I can immediately see are extremely compatible and uniquely similar would be fine marrying that young. I could see how having a kid even at 20 could be appealing. Imagine being 40, your kid is 20 and finally cool to hang around with while you're still healthy

  • Met my now wife in high school. We've been together since high school.

    We've been married for 5 years now.

    I'm 40 next.

    So kinda agree with the post, but not the sentiment that if you met your partner early you're weird. I was lucky I met the love of my life so young. Just because you didn't doesn't mean I'm weird, just not as lucky as me.

    • My wife and I both met at the tail end of college in our early 20s, we knew pretty quickly what we had but we didn't rush things other than moving in with each other after the first year. We didn't get married for another 10 years.

      I almost feel like weddings early on can put huge stress on a marriage. Even if you have somebody paying for it all it creates a lot of crap to deal with and you can get forced to meet and deal with a huge amount of new family members all at once instead of slowly integrating into those things over time. We had to pay for our wedding ourselves so had zero rush and invited only who we really wanted to be there, and while it was a blast it was still stressful. But holy shit that limo ride back to the hotel room when it was all over is a top 5 moment in both our lives.

      • Yeah we got married on our 18th anniversary of being a couple. I always said I didn't believe in marriage and I still think it's a silly idea to be honest.

        My argument was that we had made the choice to be together and to be an exclusive couple. There was zero need to get married to have that. It's a certificate that costs a fortune just to have someone else tell us the terms and conditions of our relationship. I had proposed to her a few years into being together and we just remained engaged for a decade or more.

        My Wife had an issue before the marriage where she would get odd looks off some people, some of the time, when our surnames came up. My kids had my surname and she had hers, and there's still a stigma to that from some people.

        So she changed her name legally to my surname at some point, so we even had that benefit without technically being married.

        Then one day she just said "Hey should we get married? Doesn't have to cost much at this point." I had zero argument against it except the tired old arguements of "It's just a bit of paper, we don't need the State to tell us we're together." So we went ahead, and I picked the date of our anniversary so I didn't have to remember another date.

        It was a Monday so that immediately cut the people that didn't wanna book a day off work, and it cost us £500 including food and venue (the pub over the road from our house which didn't open during the day on a Monday). And it was a cracking day. We could just wander home if we needed anything, and when we'd had enough drinking we just toddled over the road.

        As for the wedding night, my Wife still ribs me for the fact I just rolled into bed drunk and snored.

        What we managed to do was prove that a wedding doesn't need to be too much of a stress, or cost the earth, to be a meaningful event. It's still a high-point in our lives, but we didn't really gain anything from doing it.

        One thing I will never understand is the people that think that it's an important part of a relationship. A guy at work was talking about the length of his marriage. He is much older than me and was saying he had been married 40 years. I piped up that we had been together for 23 years and married for 5 and he just replied "Yeah but we've been married for 40 years" like the 18 years before our "ceremony" were meaningless. But this is the same guy that asked me yesterday if I was "A Fucking Puff or something" because I've painted my nails black. There's a generation of people still alive that think like this and honestly, I hope it's gone by the time my kids grow up.

  • Yeah! Just be with them for 15 years dragging your feet like a normal person!

  • I was recently trying to talk a person online out of marrying someone once the two of them are both 18. It's partly because they're head-over-heels in love with their partner and partly to move out of the US to Canada to escape their trans hostile state. They are trans and their partner helped them through some rough patches. The couple is only now meeting in person for the first time after three years. It was a little frustrating talking to them because I'm a naturally cautious person. My husband and I took about five years from first date to cohabiting to wedding. They honestly sounded like your stereotypical love sick teenager.

    I would agree with the general judgement of this cartoon. There's going to be some survivor bias for marriages that worked young. I know a woman who married a man who was in his 50's when she was 18, right out of high school. When he died, she never remarried. But you never hear much about the marriages where an 18-year-old deemed themselves "more mature than those other girls/boys" and it turned into a disaster. They typically don't last that long and no one wants to talk about them much.

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