Never Tell Me the Odds: Young Marriage in an Aging Institution
By BRENNEN ANDERSON
Preston reaches for the red Merriam-Webster dictionary in protest. Hurriedly, he navigates the sea of words to the O’s, Oa’s, and Oak’s; he frowns and looks up. Oakier is not a word. He removes his letter tiles and reassesses his Scrabble situation. Twenty-two year old Preston is quite tall, and twenty-three year old Breanna quite short. I gather their relative heights from the way Preston spills out of his chair in a flow of limbs, and Breanna sits contained to the confines of her chair as if in a box. Her arms extend straight and her hands rest on her knees, legs crossed at the ankles. Both members of this newly-wed couple have curly, brown hair, though Breanna’s is darker and much longer. She proudly describes her body as curvaceous. Her face, soft and rounded, is smattered with a few freckles high on her cheeks and made endearing by her big amiable smile and brown eyes. Preston, his lighter brown curls cropped short and tamed with gel, sports a closely-trimmed and surprisingly red beard. His face is similarly soft, with round cheeks, deep-set brown eyes, and an affable, toothy smile.
Preston’s gaze wanders to another part of the room, and the grin slides into a smirk, as he considers how to answer my question. Breanna answered a moment ago with a light-hearted complaint; doing the dishes for more than one person is her least favorite part of marriage. Preston reassembles his cracked smile into a straight face and says, deadpan, “My least favorite part? The company.” After some laughter and bride-assuaging, Preston elaborates: “The hardest part of being married is really just living with another person –it’s hard. You can know someone and love someone to death, but living with them is always going to be different.” Breanna nods.
In Preston’s bid for Breanna’s hand, he went to Kansas to ask her father for permission to marry her. He describes Breanna’s dad as intimidating. Even still, he confidently says, “I could take him.” He continues the story: “We were going out to grill meat and drink beer.” Her dad chose his words carefully and said nothing unnecessarily. So, Preston “told him straight up, ‘I want to marry your daughter.’”
Both Breanna’s and Preston’s parents were within one or two years of twenty-two and twenty-three when they married. As they matured, they witnessed the last five decades of marital statistics firsthand. The 1970’s saw the highest divorce rate in American history. 78% of marriages in the 1970s have ended in divorce versus the 73% of marriages in the early 1990s. As of 2008, the divorce rate hovers around fifty percent. This change took place in tandem with the continually increasing age of first time marriages and the increasing average age of married people. As the average age of first time marriages (the age of the bride and bridegroom) rose through the 1990s and 2000s, the divorce rate fell. Perhaps Breanna’s dad was aware of these statistics, but young matrimony corresponded well with the values of Breanna’s Catholic parents – particularly maintaining abstinence. So, her father assented, and Preston proposed.
The timing of Preston’s proposal (done in the Starbucks where Preston works and the pair met – Preston put the ring in a cup and gave it to her as if it were her drink) came about largely as a matter of circumstance. Preston’s parents are missionaries for a Baptist church in Irving, Texas. Concluding a year spent at home, they were returning to their mission in Kenya for another two years. “Around that time my mom was like, ‘We’re traveling overseas and coming back isn’t so much of an option,’” Preston tells me. “My mom kept on dropping hints.” Preston’s parents, understandably, didn’t want to miss their son’s wedding, and the alternative was postponing marriage for two years. “I wasn’t pressured into it – I took [the pressure] into consideration,” Preston says. “I had already decided I wanted to get married to [Breanna] and propose to her. The issue was really when I was going to propose. I was going to wait until a little bit later – I don’t know why, I just figured it would be better.”
“I didn’t think we were going to get married until two or three years down the line to be honest,” Breanna says. “I could kind of see him coming to that thought process, but I didn’t say anything.” Preston’s thought process was a combination of practicality and obligation. Though he wanted “as much time for planning as possible, ultimately, [he] really wanted [his] parents to be there.” He simply didn’t think waiting two years was necessary: “Why wait an additional two years, wasting all that gas, wasting all that time when I can just consolidate all that energy?” Gas money, time management, guest lists: though conspicuously omitted from the list of reasons, love also played a small role, Breanna sarcastically assures me.
Why wait? The question is rhetorical now, because Preston answered with a proposal. But, when the question still stood, Preston’s two older sisters, Valerie and Meredith, answered differently: experience. His “sisters each had very long relationships with guys – two years or longer – that did not work out.” Valerie (25) and Meredith (28) believe the experience of a long-term relationship helped them gain perspective on themselves, their desired characteristics for a significant other and how people and relationships operate. They believed Preston should go through a serious relationship’s demise before marrying someone. His sisters called Breanna a “break-in” girlfriend. True, Preston had not been in any long-term relationships prior to Breanna, but he was indignant at this advice. He’s still frustrated by the idea: “It’s cruel and unusual to date someone for two years and then intentionally break up with them so I can find my wife.”
Valerie and Meredith’s efforts may have been misguided, but the underlying principle of their assertion is not. The percentage of married people ages 25-34 with a Bachelor’s degree or more fell precipitously over the last forty-five years. In 1960, around 78% of 25-34 year olds were married; that figure fell to approximately 51% by 2010. In the Population Reference Bureau’s (PRB) account of the decline, the report stated that despite the falling rate of marriage in the 25-34 age range, nearly 90% of young people will marry at some point in their life. The average age of a first marriage is up from 23 and 22 for men and women in 1960 to 28 and 26 in 2008. The PRB explored reasons why people continued waiting longer and longer to marry including the economy, growing academic and professional opportunities for women, and increased levels of cohabitation not resulting in marriage.
Beyond answering why a majority of Americans wait longer to marry, the question of why the divorce rate falls as first time marriage ages rise comes up. In this regard, Preston’s sisters reflect the larger social trend. Valerie and Meredith’s justification for waiting until after the failure of a major relationship taps into the most basic effect of an increasing average age of first time marriages; the brides and grooms are people with more experience, knowledge and understanding.
Still, to Preston, the idea of waiting to get married is not necessarily the best route: “Although I’ve heard the advice that you should get married older, I didn’t take it very seriously.” He did not seek direction from the cold data coalesced into tables and suspended within a government website, but from guiding figures in his life. He “asked several of [his] childhood mentors about getting married young.” They told him “when you’re young, you’re more flexible – if you get married young you can more easily adjust to the way [your partner] lives.” Despite the value of this advice, I ask Preston how he ignores the simple factuality of data and the powerful guidance of raw information. He crosses his arms over his chest and leans back in his chair slightly, “I grew up in the culture in which my mentors also grew up. If I believe the same things they believe and I hold the same more or less morals and values about marriage and if they say getting married young is ok, then I’ll think it’s ok.”
Preston and Breanna grew up in cultures advocating young marriage or values that facilitate young marriage. The truth of this statistical data is its virtual irrelevance to them. In my effort to ascertain, concentrate, and present marriage and divorce reports, I fail to realize that the coldness of my information purée doesn’t compare to entire lifetimes filled with admired and loved figures extolling certain virtues. Preston and Breanna either respond to the statistics by highlighting their lack of specificity or by describing their relationship in intensely personal terms that spreadsheets can’t touch. Both instances indicate Preston and Breanna’s belief in their own exceptionalism as individuals and as a couple. Breanna tells me they “explored every nook and cranny of their personalities in terms of compatibility and functioning in a healthy relationship. Because the relationship was healthy, the only thing that wasn’t set in place was [their] careers.” She admits establishing a career while balancing the needs of her spouse may be difficult, but she immediately reaffirms their preparedness for marriage: “but it’s very doable I should say. Everything else was in place.” In one breath she makes their relationship too personal to evaluate with statistical comparison and cites their expected ease of finding a job as distinguishing them from the statistics. Her selective application of the statistics to her marriage shows the data is not truly irrelevant, but it is passive. It will only be as relevant as Preston and Breanna – or anyone – will allow.
At some point, Preston mentions Victorian Society and other matrimonially restrictive cultures, citing the low divorce rate of the eras fostered by a virtual inability to attain a divorce rather than marital satisfaction. He tells me the same disconnect exists in the modern marriage institution. “I don’t think the non-existence of divorce is what people care about.” He twists his ring with his right hand. “It’s really just happiness.” Until very recently, Preston was right. However, fifty years of data collected in a marriage institution offering marriage and divorce with equal availability ultimately shows that a low divorce rate is – finally – a sign of strong, happy marriages. ‘Finally’ because the gauge that inspires such skepticism in Breanna and Preston actually yields results that reflect the decisions of people. People freely choosing marriage over divorce indicates contentment, at least.
Yet, Preston and Breanna raise a couple of good questions – so what? And, should I live my life according to the Census Bureau? The circumstances under which a majority of people opt for and maintain the married life is not a predictor of the failure of a marriage not conforming to those particular circumstances. Nor are those circumstances the best for everyone, because there are, after all, exceptions. Preston and Breanna have found something exceptional in each other they can see loving for the rest of their lives, and if nothing else, they have had three happy months together so far. Preston appeals to young people entering the turnstile of marriage to maintain their confidence and enthusiasm, even if that means ignoring the statistics: “I’m not saying don’t think about the statistics, and I’m not saying don’t think about the future. But, for God’s sake, if you get married, at least be happy now – get married happily.”