Marriage

Lately I have read a lot of articles about marriage, either about how having children before marriage is a growing trend and what this means for the relationship/the children, or how it is OK to get married young, even how celebrities are getting married young purely because they have the resources (and I guess the rest of the world doesn't?) to be reckless when they are young.

I think the one thing I've gathered from all of these articles is that it's ok to get married young, if you want to. But most of all, I think we need to stop judging other people's decisions on when to get married, or not get married. I have spent a lot of time talking with my friends about other friends who got married way too young, but this is really just an opinion about it. In this article, the author points out that marriage didn't used to be something you did after you got your life figured out, but it was a way of getting support from a loved one (or.... a prescribed person) to get to that place in your life where you have your life figured out.

Maybe the author has something there, I mean, one of the reasons a lot of arranged marriages ended with the two people loving each other is because they experienced a lot of life together. Not that today's marriages are the same as an arranged marriage (and yes, I know arranged marriage still happen) but they do require a certain amount of growing with the person you are with in order to succeed.

I'm not about to run out and get married, it's not what I want to do, I love my independence and can't imagine being tied to someone in that way right now, but I will definitely stop judging my friends who are married and who chose to marry young. They aren't throwing away their independence, they are combining their independences, which doesn't necessarily make them less independent.