At Any Age: of Marriage, Part I

I've read statistics of marriage, singleness, divorce, infidelity, and marital happiness. Advice columnists warn young infatuated people to not marry young, movies inform us that there is 'that one' somewhere out there, and that special music will play when we meet them, and our embittered single friends proclaim that all relationships are doomed and it's all a game.

What of this is true?

What of this is relative?

How many young people out there are passing on happy marriages because they listen to others, how many married people are cheating because they feel more alive, how many single people are gaming the game because they refuse to be taken by the game? And how many people are still passing up happiness because they are waiting for that fairytale experience?


How many more people dive into the wrong marriage because they want that fairytale experience at any expense?

I would like to address these questions, and more, in a segmented series on this blog. I don't have much research or knowledge, but I have personal experience, and I see and hear a lot of stigma associated with different aspects of marriage that I just feel like commenting on.

Today's marriage topic: Age. How young, exactly, is too young? When Michael and I got engaged, at the tender and foolish age of nineteen, we were warned by a few that we were far too young to know what love was, and that maybe we should just stay engaged for a few years, mature a little, and have a wedding when we were well established in our jobs and personalities. We smiled, nodded, thanked them, and then did exactly as we pleased. We may have been young, but we were older than our age, both of us having been on our own a bit earlier than most of our peers. We knew that we loved each other intensely, knew that we fit each others' jagged edges like two halves of a broken plate, and we knew that we could make it work.

And we have... for nearly eleven years now, we have braved the waves of life side by side. Oh sure, I could blither on about how it 'hasn't been easy' and 'marriage takes hard work', but I might nauseate myself. Nothing in life is easy, but sharing a bed and a home with my best friend has been one of the finer points in my life! Sure, we fight sometimes. When you rub elbows with one person for hours on end you're bound to fight, especially if that person has to share responsibilities and bills and whining children and dirty dishes and ingrown toenails... all in all, however, it's been good, and I have every intention of having it remain good for another eleven years, and then thirty or so after that.

So how have we trumped the statistic of young marrieds? Sheer force of will? Dumb luck? Are we some of those very few that have their destinies written in the stars and actually found it? A combination of all three?

Well, let me state here that I do not believe there is only one person for every other person. That would be like the baggage claim from hell: you pick up the green suitcase and carry it away, sure your name is emblazoned on the tag. You carry it home and unpack it, only to find mismatched socks, underwear with skid marks, and a half-eaten sandwich instead of your own pressed and folded shirts. What you don't know (yet) is that the next person in line picked up the black suitcase that should have gone to you, which means that the person after them may or may not get their suitcase, and it's all gong to be one disaster.

While Michael is 'the one' for me, it is because I took a vow to keep it that way, not because stars fell over our heads on our first date (actually, salt did, but that's another story). No violin concerto played, the only music I heard was his fumbling lute picking beside me in the golden Ohio afternoon. While he was immediately convinced that he would spend the rest of his life with me, I was still flitting around the Renaissance flirting with other guys, it took me a whole month longer to figure it out!

On the matter of a couple being too young to have solid identities, I ask why one has to have a solid, single identity? I thrill in the fact that we as a couple have discovered our favorite movies together, yet still have completely different tastes in music. I adore that we entered this union as immature, starstruck people in love, and we're going to go out of this world only slightly more mature, but still happy and in love. Rather than being concretely established in a career, I am proud to have learned and grown in my career while Mike has done the same in his own field, and I am excited when our careers merge! We are two people who have become so enmeshed in each other and each others' lives that we are one flesh, one mind, one heart. Yet somehow we are individuals.

Age has very little to do with it. I've seen people marry young and divorce months later, I have customers who married at 16 and are still in love at 75. I've seen mature, confident, established people marry at 28 and fall out of love a year later because they just couldn't mesh their lives, and I've seen people change everything about themselves in order to woo a person who really makes them miserable in the long run.

Age has so little to do with it, taking into consideration the person was an adult in the first place.

I think some of the factors necessary for a marriage, at any age, to work are:

• Maturity
• Selflessness
• Determination
• Humility
• Sensuality + Commitment (these must go hand in hand)
  
• Humor

But guess what? I didn't have most of those qualities when I married, and I am not much closer to them a decade later. The cool thing about love, to wrap all that up, is that it can be so forgiving. However, if a person is missing all of these qualities, there is a high chance they will never be happy at all, let alone within a relationship.

I didn't start this post to lay out answers for you, only questions. If you are a young person considering marriage, I have a question for you: will you still love this person when they embarass you at parties, vote differently than you, and refuse to take out the garbage?

If you are a married person considering divorce or a fling, I have one question for you: will this fix what is lacking inside of you?

Part II of this series is here.

Labels: age, commitment, divorce, first love, love, marriage