I've been reflecting recently on the fact that I'm 24 years old now. (Eeek! How did that happen?) I was married at 20, had my first child at 22, and will have my second this year. It makes me wonder if people are ever tempted to tell me to "act my age." It's not the norm these days to do that so young; in fact, it's not the norm to get married at all.
Seeing our younger siblings contemplating marriage has been stressful for me. I want to tell them to back up and think about this more deeply: marriage affects so much of your life! I want to ask lots of nosy questions that they won't know the answers to yet, because they've never been in a situation like marriage before. I want to tell them to grow up more before they even think about making that commitment.
But on the other hand, I recognize that I probably shouldn't. For one thing, it won't do any good. For another, they would probably be justified in thinking it a little hypocritical of me. I sometimes look at my marriage and think, "Wow, I sure lucked out, because I didn't even think about whether Regis would be X or do Y. It's a good thing he is/does." And then sometimes I think that marriage is really a craps shoot, anyway: there's no way you can know everything about the person you marry or how their character and behaviors will affect your union, so you might as well pick your numbers as best you can and roll the dice.
I think marriage makes you grow up a lot. But I don't advise doing it that way.
2 comments:
I agree marriage advice is nearly always ingnored and rarely understandable till after the fact anyway...I too feel lucky:)
I agree with you. I think marriage was a much easier transition for me than it was for many people because I was older than you are now by the time I got married. Of course, it also means that my early adulthood was lonelier and more romantically deprived than yours.
I think early adulthood is probably just hard. You can either go through it single, or you can go through it married. Either way, you'll grow up. But if you're already married, you have to start off that marriage with the strain of growing up and possibly changing quite a bit, plus you may realize along the way that your choices were adolescent and hasty. If you don't get married until you're already grown up, I think it takes out a lot of that strain, and theoretically you would make a more educated and grounded marriage decision that would depend less on luck.
But yeah, it never really does much good to tell that to the young-uns.
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