Marrying young went well for me, part 1

Jeff and I got married 14 years ago. Alongside having our children, that’s been the best thing in my personal life.

We were 23 — that’s not far off from the median age at first marriage for US women at that time (25, now 28), but a lot younger than most of our peers.

There’s a way that this feels unkind to write about, because so many people would like to be married and aren’t, or are in a marriage that’s not working well. But I hope it’s useful?

Note on selection bias: you won’t get many accounts of the messy middle ground of marriages that aren’t doing well. There are people who feel good enough to write about their marriage, and on the other end people writing about their divorces. You should take me with a grain of salt.

Why marriage at all?

Recently someone told me they were getting married despite not really getting what the point of marriage was. Maybe they meant the outward part rather than “an internal agreement between the two of you to stay together for life.” Whether or not you do the outward part, the agreement to stay together for life feels really important and good to me. We can plan so much better!

Having a joint budget was a big part of this — I could move to his hometown and not find a job immediately, I could go to grad school without taking on debt. (This has worked out in my favor for sure — there was one summer where I earned more than him, but otherwise he’s contributed a lot more than I have to the family income.)

We bought a house together and put a lot of work into it. (“We” in this case mostly means Jeff, both in terms of money and labor.)

The biggest collaboration has been in parenting. If I had never found someone I wanted to raise kids with, I might still have done it solo. But I had kids younger and more confidently with a partner I expected to spend my life with. I’ve put in more of the work here, but we’ve both gotten a lot out of it.

Of course, all of this falls through for some people. They put a spouse through grad school or leave the workforce to raise kids and regret it later. But when it works, it seems really good to me.

The division of labor in our marriage has worked out pretty traditionally. (This is not necessarily how it was going to work out; early in our relationship it seemed like I might support him if he wanted to be a full-time folk musician.) We’ve both worked full-time nearly all of our marriage, but he’s earned a lot more than me. I’ve put in more physical investment in pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, and more of the child-related logistics. 

Compared to what I hear from other married women with kids, I think he’s unusually committed to an egalitarian relationship. I’ve been very lucky to have a partner who takes my career at least as seriously as his even though he earns more, and who puts in a bit more than half of the household work.

Why social marriage vs a private commitment?

If you plan to be monogamous, having a ring and a social marriage seems useful in signaling to everyone that you’re not available. (I’d kind of like it if society came up with a slightly different signal for non-monogamous marriage, like a different way of wearing the ring or something.) 

Why young?

I don’t think this is that important, but it did work out well for us.

We got to move ahead with our life plans earlier. We had five years of marriage (including some travel) before having kids. We had kids starting in our late twenties, when it was biologically easier than if we’d started later. We’ll have more overlap of our lifetimes with our children and possibly grandchildren.

Why monogamy?

A fair number of our friends are in poly or open marriages. We’ve talked about this possibility, but decided to stay monogamous because

• We had a lot to lose — our perception was that polyamory increases couples’ risk of breaking up, and that seemed really not worth it.
• We weren’t sure if polyamory was a good fit for our personalities and wishes.
• Modern polyamory is relatively new, and we thought it might have significant downsides we didn’t really understand.
• Less importantly, I didn’t want to spend weirdness points here.

Aella’s survey of mono and poly people about their primary relationships is interesting here. They weren’t as different as I expected.

Downsides

If I were single, maybe I would have moved to the Bay Area where I could do my job better. Ironically, Jeff might have done the same. The fact that we’d bought a house and wanted to raise our kids near his family is a lot of what’s kept us in Boston.

Stuff we had going for us

We were good at communicating with each other. This was something I remember our clearness committee saying we had going for us (more on that in part 2). We still like talking to each other.

We were both into living on a low budget, especially for the first ~10 years together. We still had conflict over how much to donate, but not as much as I would have expected.

We didn’t have a bunch of the demographic factors that increase risk of divorce: our parents hadn’t divorced, we weren’t teenagers, we had both finished college, we had a high joint income, we didn’t already have any children, I wasn’t pregnant, and we had never been divorced before. (A lot of these are correlated with higher marriage satisfaction as well, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as a low divorce rate.) We were attending Quaker meeting at the time, though I’m not sure if the correlation between religiosity and marriage satisfaction still holds when the people in question are atheists.

Stuff that could have gone badly

We lived together before marrying, which is somewhat correlated with a higher divorce rate and lower marriage satisfaction (although maybe that’s changing, and maybe it’s all because of lower religiosity).

Given that I proposed to Jeff after we’d been together for six months, we didn’t know each other that well. I look back and feel lucky that it worked out as well as it did, given that a lot of other views I held at age 21 now seem silly to me. The biggest thing we hadn’t talked about was whether to have kids (though we did talk about that before he said yes.)

When we met, we both knew I was really into donating money, but EA didn’t exist and it would be years before we met anyone in person who was into these ideas. But we both got into rationality and EA. I think it’s often hard when one person is really into one of those and the other isn’t (but possible, rather like an interfaith marriage or theist-nontheist marriage).

We aren’t super compatible sexually, and at times that’s been difficult, but for the most part it hasn’t been that big a deal.

The plan

We went in with the attitude that we weren’t going to get divorced. Before we got engaged we spelled out acceptable reasons to get divorced: 

• if one of us became abusive
• If one of us was really unhappy in the relationship and we’d tried for at least a year to improve things (like by going to couples counseling) and they were still really unhappy

“If we met someone we liked better” was spelled out as not an acceptable reason.

Whenever we discussed something related to this, Jeff would say “But we’re not going to get divorced.” I like this.

We went into the marriage with basically zero financial assets, and we didn’t have a prenuptial agreement.

The backup plan

I like that I don’t have to dedicate much brainspace to wondering what’s going to happen in the relationship. I don’t have a picture of what life would be like if we split up, and basically don’t think about it. 

I have some kind of pre-coping in place for if he dies. We have wills and he has life insurance. We have each other’s blessing to move on to another relationship when one of us dies.

Is lack of experience bad?

If you think of this like the secretary problem, we didn’t interview many candidates. We’d each had only one serious relationship before. 

But the divorce rate is lower for women who have fewer premarital sexual partners (although not for men, and maybe the pattern is because of religiosity). Marriage satisfaction is higher with fewer partners. 

Study on duration and happiness of marriages (based on large population surveys): “The greatest indicated likelihood of being in an intact marriage of the highest quality is among those who married at ages 22-25. . . . The negative relationship beyond the early to mid twenties between age at marriage and marital success is likely to be at least partially spurious, and thus it would be premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22-25. However, the findings do suggest that most persons have little or nothing to gain in the way of marital success by deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid twenties.”

…..

Obviously you shouldn’t conclude too much from this one example. But I do think some couples who are together for a decade before getting married might be better off getting married sooner.

Related

• Jeff on Lifelong investments
• A semi-joke post: Micromarriages
• Analysis of how likely a given number of children is for different ages of marriage