Sheryl Sandberg recently said, "the most important career choice you'll make is who you marry." Choosing the right spouse is bigger than that. It's the most important life choice that you'll make.
The other day I consoled a friend whose marriage is falling apart. Fights about money. Separate vacations. Restricted bank accounts. Drinking on the sly. Bad stuff.
At the same time, there's been lots of talk about the pros and the cons of getting married in your early 20's. For me, marrying in my early 20's would have been disastrous. [Several sentences about my dating history prior to the age of 30 were just deleted.] There might be a greater dating pool in college and it might make career sense to start a family in your 20's and get it out of the way, but a person isn't quite cooked until they hit 30. Or at least, I wasn't.
So, how should you pick a good mate?
The basic priorities have to be the same. Is the priority going to be career advancement, family, material goodies, religion, extreme sports? You can't have it all in life, and you need to pick someone who wants basically the same stuff that you do. If need a stable life where the bills are paid regularly and there is always a quart of milk in the fridge, don't marry a guy whose priority is drinking in dive bars in the East Village.
But after you get the deal breakers out of the way, there is a lot of room for choices. It helps to have certain things in common and to have the definition of fun. For example, Steve and I both like food, so we eat well together. We watch Game of Thrones and dream about vacations that we'll take when the kids are older. Because we met in grad school, we were already very similar types of people. But those things aren't deal breakers. People can grow to like their partners' interests or at least, put up with their weird obsessions with electronic music or orchids.
You also have to do the right things to maintain the marriage. Surround yourself with people who have a good marriage. If your friends are a mess, you'll be a mess. Be kind to each other. Laugh at the other's jokes. Take the time to have fun. Trust each other. Talk during dinner.
Well, now I feel very old and boring. But boring works. Boring is much better than fights about money. Separate vacations. Restricted bank accounts. Drinking on the sly. Bad stuff. My advice is to be boring, but have lots of laughs, too.
Apt. 11d 
What’s wrong with separate vacations? I’ll be going alone to visit my sister in London at the end of this month and I can’t remember the last time I was this excited for something.
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I married in my early 20s (my husband is 4 years older) and it was the best decision for sure – we’ve made it 19 years so far. But we did delay having kids, and then infertility & infant loss delayed us further. But I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to my kids.
I do think growing together through our 20s was a strength for us, but it took a lot of work at particular times to do it. We are opposites in a lot of ways.
In terms of choice the critical thing for me is that my husband is someone I admire as a human being (as well as being a lot of fun, too.) He is profoundly ethical without being dogmatic, and he treats others well with good boundaries for himself. He’s thoughtful and kind. We probably did not date long enough before we married but we dealt with some situations that let me see how he worked under stress.
I’m not sure he would be the one to back me in a run for a CEO job at Facebook, but that works because that’s not where I am…I am ambitious but for other things.
We have had few arguments about money, although some. Chores, tons. Family and ethics, almost never.
We do separate vacations, sort of (I go to conferences; he goes to martial arts camp)…we actually have pretty diverse hobbies and interests and while I know some people look at us and think we are apart a lot, that’s what works for us. We both take whatever our crazy passions give us and bring it back to the relationship, and that’s the key.
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“The basic priorities have to be the same” And there’s the rub with marrying in your early 20s: anyone you marry at that age is probably someone you’ve been with during college, and a lot of people just don’t know what their priorities are yet at that age.
I got married at 22 and divorced 18 months later, in no small part because I didn’t see my husband’s “college partying” was actually alcoholism until it kept up after graduation. Even without the drinking, my own priorities shifted radically over the next five years. My ideas about my career changed once I actually started working, and having a family went from “maybe someday but not a big deal” to “important enough to go through infertility treatment”. I decided I wanted to stay in my hometown, instead of moving across the country. I understood money a lot better when I actually became responsible for my own expenses, and going through a layoff early in my career made me more conservative still.
When I started dating my now-husband shortly after my divorce, I knew a lot more about who I was and who I was looking for in a mate. We married three years later, and we’ve been married 10 years. I wish I had held off on marrying my first husband and had a bad breakup instead of a divorce — and it would have been much worse if there had been kids involved.
When you’re 20 or 21, all this stuff is so abstract that picking a long-term compatible boyfriend is the luck of the draw, but you may find later that you’ve got a problem you can’t just marriage-counsel away. Julia Shaw may have won that particular coin-toss, but having been on the other side, I would much rather have put marriage off for a while.
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I think my wife and I probably changed just as much after 35 (when we got married) than we did from 25 to 35. But mostly we changed together, because of our commitment to marriage, to each other, and to a home of peace and harmony. That is, each person has always respected and been willing to consider the other person’s ideas and to accept, and indeed usually to join in, whatever changes the other person was undergoing.
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If the secret drinking isn’t secret from your spouse, say just your employer, it should be fine from the standpoint of your marriage.
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I think this is one of those topics that is hard to separate from your own experience. In our case, we got engaged at ages 24/25 and married at 25/26. 19 years later, still going strong. (We met in Jr. High, went to HS together, but didn’t date until I was in grad school.)
I don’t feel like we were too young to get married. But if I had married any of the boys from my “college pool” I would certainly be divorced by now. They were more intested in money, country clubs, and prestige than I turned out to be.
I disagree with the mother-letter-writer’s assumption that a Princeton boy is “better” or “smarter” than the men you will meet out in the working world. Some of the smartest men I know went to state schools. (and some of the biggest jerks I have met went Ivy League.) She seems to have a very narrow view of what makes a good husband…
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I married my college boyfriend in my mid-twenties. Since I’m looking for a divorce lawyer twenty years later and it seems like most of my happily-married friends either married late or had starter marriages before they found one that stuck, it’s no surprise that I’m dubious about early marriages.
I think AB is correct – people don’t always know what their priorities are in their early 20s. Moreover, many (most?) are just beginning to understand their own needs and capacity for emotional intimacy, how to cope when things go wrong, what they can and cannot control. It’s risky to marry at the beginning stages of working these things out. Of course, I’m sure some people have it nailed down at 24, but most of us don’t.
So my advice is, don’t make any commitments before 30. Also: don’t marry adult children of alcoholics without a signed certificate of approval from a couple’s counselor. But that’s another comment.
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“But mostly we changed together, because of our commitment to marriage, to each other, and to a home of peace and harmony. ‘
I married in my 20’s, and yes, the same is true for us; we celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary this year.
If age is going to be the differentiating variable, I can imagine that one could be more confident that the 35 year old is *not* going to have a substance abuse/addiction/mental illness than that an 18 year old will not develop those problems. Unfortunately, 35 is really too old for women to start thinking about starting a family, unless being childless is a comfortable option.
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I’ll go further and say that absent addiction/mental illness (which I consider to be diseases) that a lot of what makes a marriage survive over 20+ years is the choice to make it happen, to weather the ups and downs, to accommodate the choices and changes as life moves forward, not finding the perfect person whose life choices are compatible with yours.
(Now, of course, that commitment is itself a life choice).
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Within a year of graduating from college, some women that I knew in my class married men that were older than us, 5 to 15 years older than us. At the time, I thought this was creepy. But, based on the comments raised here, it may not have been a bad strategy. The women had the benefit of seeing how and where these men landed, and the the women were still young.
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Support is important. Been with my partner 15 years (hoping to eventually marry some day – let’s see what SCOTUS says). Neither her nor my families were super supportive of us so living in a progressive part of the country has made a difference. When we went through a rough spot about 10 years ago a former boss who still worked at my company, and with whom we were friends basically had a “let me knock some sense into you two before you stupidly end a good thing,” talk with us. I’m grateful to this day. I’ve heard similar things from other couples, straight & lbgt: you need to have folks rooting for your relationship.
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When I started dating my now-husband shortly after my divorce, I knew a lot more about who I was and who I was looking for in a mate. We married three years later, and we’ve been married 10 years. I wish I had held off on marrying my first husband and had a bad breakup instead of a divorce — and it would have been much worse if there had been kids involved.
Yep. Except I was in my mid/late 20s and should have known better. I married in part because my ex-husband needed a visa and we thought we’d get married first and fix the problems in the relationship after. Dumbest decision ever. Looking back at it, a big part of it was I fell madly in love at 23 and decided I’d met the man I would marry, and then spent the next 4 years ignoring/rationalizing away the increasingly clear signals that it was a bad decision. The best thing I got out of the relationship was 2 years of couples therapy. It did nothing for the current relationship, but learning to identify and change my own flaws and communication issues has really helped me in my current relationship.
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I got married to my husband just shy of 23. By that point, I had cooked and laundered for our family of five when my mom had cancer when I was 15, I had gone off to college two states away at 16, I’d done a study abroad to St. Petersburg, I had taught two years of high school for the Peace Corps in the Russian Far East and I was nearly a year into graduate school. My husband, meanwhile, had already finished a doctorate in math and was nearly two years into his second doctorate. He was 25. We’ve been married nearly 15 years now.
We got married awfully fast (faster than I would advise our kids to get married), but there weren’t any huge surprises in the years that followed and it was a real comfort during graduate school. We were both what-you-see-is-what-you-get. In our particular case, there wasn’t anything to be gained by waiting. (One parent had a meltdown over our engagement that went on for a surprisingly long time. That was unfortunate, but it was their loss.)
I do worry a bit about marrying during college, as it’s a very artificial environment (as in the example upthread of not noticing that a guy was a raging alcoholic because they were in college).
Laura said:
“…but a person isn’t quite cooked until they hit 30. Or at least, I wasn’t.”
But marriage can be a substantial part of the young adult education. A lot of what makes you a good spouse has to be learned on the job, just as parenting can’t really be mastered without kids.
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I’ll take boring any day over a bad marriage/divorce, etc!
We married in our early to mid 20s (nearly 24), but then, again, we waited to start dating (until 18, nearly 19, when we met precisely 23 years ago) and that must have helped.
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Despite cringing when I read it, I’d like to speak in favor of the Princeton mom’s advice, since it was exactly my approach. Growing up in a small town 100 miles from the nearest metropolis, there just weren’t many dating options for a “smart kid”. I figured that a selective college was my best chance at finding a wife, and even though I ended up in a creative class mecca, I still think I was correct. I suspect that the same applies for a lot of other people who don’t quite fit in back home for other reasons, and would give the same advice to people from similar backgrounds attending HBCUs or religiously-affiliated schools.
At 25, I was among the last of my high school friends to marry but among the first of my college friends to do so. We’re only 15 years in, but I haven’t noticed much correlation among my college friends between age-at-marriage and divorce rates.
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I’m not cooked now (age 47), but I really enjoy simmering in the pot with my husband. 🙂
My deets: we met my sophomore/his freshman year of college but didn’t start dating till we both graduated college (age 23). We moved in together at age 24 (I had skipped a grade in elementary, so we’re roughly the same age), married at 26, and have been happily married 21 years this May. 🙂
The only hard part was his initial reluctance to have kids. I had to say to him once “Either we have kids, or you have to let me go.” He chose me and having kids. We’ve come to realize that my job in the relationship is to make change happen before we get too bored. I’m always the one with my head in the clouds, coming up with awesome ideas. He keeps me grounded so we don’t have to go bankrupt or anything like that. This is why we currently don’t have a plan to go to Germany this summer. 🙂 He says “Um, can we really buy a house *and* afford a trip to Germany?” Without him, I’d be making plane reservations right now. 🙂
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Wendy,
Awww. Very sweet.
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I appreciate this post and the comments. I know a student who wants to get married and have kids immediately out of high school. I don’t feel that I can tell her “don’t do it” because every situation is different, but everything in my being is saying, “oh, honey – don’t do that to yourself.” I’m gently, gently trying to get her to think differently.
Personally, ditto a lot of the comments above. Had I gotten hitched to the bad-boy type I was attracted to in college, t’would have been a disaster.
My hubster of going-on-15-years (married at 25 when he was finishing undergrad and I was starting grad school) is my best friend. We support each other and, most importantly, we have adventures together.
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