Marriage and Age Essay

Jennifer Bouchie
Teresa Alto
Composition II
5/9/2014
Final Draft
Young Age and Marriage There is a typical reaction that people have to the idea of two young adults, people in their late teens or early twenties, deciding to get married. They question whether the couple is ready for the commitment, tell them they're too young to handle the responsibility, say they should live their lives before settling down and overall, declare that the marriage is doomed to fail. The big question is-- does getting married as a young adult actually have a negative effect on a marriage? To answer this question we'll look at reasons why young marriage could have a high probability for divorce, why people decide to marry young, how the marriage could affect finances and education, and what is considered the “acceptable” marrying age and the logic behind the number. The divorce rate is a high 50 percent in America and many choose to blame young marriage as one the reasons that marriages don't last. Does age actually have anything to do with it? According to statistics Dr. Phil gives on his website from the national center of health 60 percent of marriages that are between young couples in the age range of mid to late twenties end in divorce. An article written by M.D. Bramlett and W.D. Mosher called “Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the United States” says that a women who marries aroung the age of eighteen has a 69 percent chance of her marriage to fail within the first fifteen years. These statistics do paint the picture that marriage at a young age can be harmful to a marriage. One reason for this could be the in Katherine Lotze's article in the Huffington Post that starts off by claiming that a poll taken at Clark University shows that eighty-six percent of people eighteen to twenty-six years old that are both married and single think that their marriage is going to last a lifetime. The Clark University researchers attributed this to the young people's “over-romaticized” view of a marriage. They reported that easily over half of the subjects questioned had an unrealistic idea of what marriage would ask of them. The subjects seemed to believe that the only thing needed to hold a marriage together was love. The reasearchers believe this idealism is a big reason why young people get divorced within the first decade of marriage. The reasoning behind this assumption is the couple moves on to having kids or a busy life that doesn't allow time for all the romance and the couple begins to feel they are falling out of love with each other because they begin to feel the lack of attention. Clark University's poll left people believing young adults aren't in the right mind set to marry, until they're older. While the study isn't a definite indicator of America's young adult mind-set, it's a safe bet that all those fairytales told as bed time stories, with the prince and the princess and their “happily ever after”, have made their way into the views of a large majority of the population. Now those kids have grown up and are looking for their “one and only” to share a lifetime with. Every single couple in world will have an argument, at some point. The article “Age Affects How We Handle Conflict” on Science Daily based on research done at San Francisco University talks about the effects of age on handling conflict. The findings were that as a couple gets older they are more likely to handle a conflict less hostile, and focus on the more positive experiences that life has to offer. Older couples are observed to be more passive than younger couples (“Age Affects”). Is it possible couples at a young age aren't able to handle major disputes that married life brings maturely enough? This research finds that marrying at an older age can lead to less “explosive” arguments and result in fewer splits over that “last straw.” This inability to cope with arguments in an effective manner could be a second reason a young marriage could fail.

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