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Dayo, you say the article in the Washington Post “conflates enthusiasm for child-rearing with enthusiasm for marriage—a mythology one would think modern reality continually explodes.” Modern reality is exploding the connection between these two events, much to the disservice of the now 40 percent of children born to unwed mothers in this country. And there is no getting around the fact that women putting off marriage and childbearing until well into their thirties raises the risks of compromised fertility. I am the result of an early marriage—my mother was 19 and father 20 when they got married, and I was born a year later. Theirs was a thoroughly disastrous union and both my parents urged me not to get married, or if I had to, not to do it young. I grew up thinking that a major part of what made their marriage so bitter was they both felt it had robbed them of their youth. In an overreaction, I didn't marry until I was 38. Because of my own experience, I used to think it was crazy to get married early. Now I'm not so sure (although I'm not talking about teen marriage). I used to think marrying your high school or college sweetheart led inevitably to feeling a desperate desire for a fresh partner when you're 40. But maybe finding early love and making it permanent might be a beneficial thing for many people. It certainly saves on the years of heartache, dead ends, and wondering if you'll find someone while you can still have children.
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Mark Regnerus has a piece in the weekend Washington Post that is crying out for young people to get married. That’s a fine argument to make, and he does it no extreme disservice—emphasizing, however, that early marriage has suddenly become stigmatized among young women:
[M]any women report feeling peer pressure to avoid giving serious thought to marriage until they're at least in their late 20s. If you're seeking a mate in college, you're considered a pariah, someone after her "MRS degree." Actively considering marriage when you're 20 or 21 seems so sappy, so unsexy, so anachronistic. Those who do fear to admit it—it's that scandalous.
Firstly, the article’s catalogue of the dynamics between women in my peer group seems oversold (one female college student likens talk of marriage to “staging a rebellion.” What happened to lower back tattoos?). No one is forcing anyone to stay unhitched; this analysis seems a back door into yet another tale of women judging one another in some sort of endless, catty bride war, searching for “scandalous” behavior—whereas for the 19, 20, and 21-year-old men asking for these maiden hands in marriage, there is no such rush to judgment.
Regnerus then flagellates the parents of the young holdouts, and by consequence himself, for obscuring the many cultural virtues of early marriage:
How did we get here? The fault lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents. Our own ideas about marriage changed as we climbed toward career success. Many of us got our MBAs, JDs, MDs and PhDs. Now we advise our children to complete their education before even contemplating marriage, to launch their careers and become financially independent. We caution that depending on another person is weak and fragile. We don't want them to rush into a relationship. We won't help you with college tuition anymore, we threaten. Don't repeat our mistakes, we warn.
Yes, there are advantages—obvious ones—to getting married. I don’t think kids today are unaware that it’s a financially preferable arrangement. But this “our children” angle seems disingenuous. In fact, the whole piece seems targeted not at “indecisive young people” and their enablers, but at young women in particular. Maybe I’m as out of touch with shifting social conventions as the author, but I don’t sense coequal lecturing of men about the ills of dependence. (In my head, men receive more of a "wild oats" conversation.) Not to speak of withholding tuition!
I suppose Regnerus’ argument troubles me most where it suggests—with little proof—that a conservative, gendered norm is returning to what had been his generation’s wayward adventure into higher education and marriages “with math on their side.” Further, it’s hard to tell of what he complains: Does Regnerus want more marriages, younger marriages or more stable marriages?
If he had made the point that marrying early and then continuing the 20s and 30s trajectory of college, bars, apartments, mistakes, MBAs, JDs, MDs, and PhDs, that would suggest his flacking for marriage were based on some theory of economics and companionship. But his nagging is targeted at the women who have collectively embraced third wave feminist cake-eating because then they won’t procreate. Men who wait and wait for the ring “get there,” he says—whereas women must “beg, pray, borrow and pay” to reclaim fertility later in life. In other words, Regnerus conflates enthusiasm for child-rearing with enthusiasm for marriage—a mythology one would think modern reality continually explodes.
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