early marriage

concerned mama

In a previous post, some of you talked about your current age and number of years married. Subtract and voila, many of you married young, by which I mean before 20 years of age. Congrats to all of you couples, married long and short! By the way I have been married 21 years and I am 45.

Do you feel that your JW upbringing, if that is appropriate in your case, had a lot to do with the early marriages?

Presumably some of the JW kids will attend university, where most kids plan to marry no sooner than mid twenties. Do you think this will up their marriage age, or will there be so much sexual tension that they will marry early anyway and just be married students? I have heard that there are a few more JW kids going to college. The only JW I know well seems to think that 20 is a good age for a guy to marry at as long as he is "mature".??????????????????

ItsJustMe

It definitely seems as if children raised as JWs get married very young - between 18 and 21. I was married a few months before my 21st birthday and my hubby was 21.

We have been married several years now. We are still very much in love. BUT......we are COMPLETELY different people now than we were then. We are lucky in that as we grew we grew together and not apart. It could just as easily gone the other way. I have encouraged all young JWs not to be in a rush to get married. If one of us still harbored the goals we had when we first were married, we would be having serious problems right now.

There are always one or two people in their late twenties, early thirties in each congregation, and everyone does seem to look at them as if they will never get married.

I think there is too much pressure to marry the first person you date.

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NameWithheld

ItsJustMe: You took the words right out of my mouth. My wife and I married way to young. Why? We were horny and it was the only way to legally 'get some' Do I regret it? Not on your life!!! But we too were lucky to grow as people in the same direction - it could have been bad. And it was rough during the phase where I tried to miss as many meetings as possible and she was feeling guilty about it. Luckly she saw the 'new light' shortly after that.

It does seem that if a JW isn't married by the time they're in their mid 20's then the chances of them getting married begins to drop rapidly. The good ones are always taken early!

Ditto on the pressure to turn dating into marrage as quick as possible - since dating is such taboo anyway, and not supposed to be done for 'fun', but only in leading to marrage.

Nathan Natas

Hormones, so they say, lead to fornication.

Marriage is supposed to be a remedy for fornication, but its a stepping stone to adultery.

NameWithheld

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BobsGirl

I had four siblings marry BEFORE their 20th birthday. I had one sibling marry at 24. I was 30 when I married ... but I was out of the borg. I went back to school, started a career, made a home .... DATED! I actually waited until I met the man I couldn't live without before I married. On the day he asked me to marry him .. I told him that if he ever even considered converting to JWism that I would leave his a**....and then I said YES!!

All but one of my sibling’s marriages are troubled. I sometimes see resentment in their eyes when they see us having loving fun with each other. I can almost hear the .... "I am doing everything right and she is doing everything wrong and She is having fun while I am not." And then I see the self satisfied "Well SHE is having her reward in full" creep in. Nice.

I feel very sad for them actually.

BobsGirl

"May the work of your hands be a sign of gratitude and reverence to the human condition." - Mahatma Gandhi

Billygoat

Let's see...I was 25 when I got married. A year and a half later we got divorced. I'm 30 now. I think I got married too young and to the wrong guy. I've always believed that the 20's are phase two of adolescence. You grow and change too much during that part of life. Who you are at 21 is totally different than who you are at 29. So I do think getting married before 20 is pretty young. But then again, there are other people that are way more mature than me and have less baggage than I had! Haha!

Andi

Angharad

I got married to Simon, 2 days after my 19th brithday, Simon was older than me I wont tell you by how much

dubla

at age 17 i was involved in serious relationship (both of us were jws at the time), and i remember clearly talking about getting married around 18-19. we had "gotten in trouble" already a couple of times, and marraige was definitely the way to fix all the worries and frustrations of being "in love" and handcuffed with the no touching rules. at the time it seemed perfectly normal to get married before 20, as im sure its still normal for many jws......but wow, i cant imagine what my life wouldve been like had i actually done it. im with andi on this one, you change WAY too much in your 20s to be married. it works with some, but i personally have changed so much, even from 21-25, that its unfathomable for me now to imagine being married at 18. the witnesses force too many of these decisions (marraige, baptism) on KIDS that dont even know what they want in life yet. its sad.

aa

JBean

I agree... JW's in a sense force marriage on KIDS way to young to know who they even are yet! Can't go to college, can't date, can't, can't, can't... well... I up and got married at 19 also...to get out of the house and to feel like I was doing something productive! Well...also got divorced 2 years later (no kids, thankfully) and now I can't believe I ever even LIKED the guy, never mind LOVE him. I see him around town occassionally and don't have ANYTHING in common with him. Feels like an entire lifetime ago...

early marriage

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