“Do early marriages tend to end in disaster?”

Answer/Brother Darwin L. Thomas

Yes, yes, yes! It is unusual to find a question that can be answered as simply as this one. Yet I suspect that if you and I were talking together, the above answer would not really be very satisfying. You would probably bombard me with a series of follow-up questions, such as: Why are you so sure? Have not some of your friends married quite young and still had successful marriages? What do you mean by early marriage? Since we can’t have a dialogue on the topic, let me answer some of the questions that may make the yes-yes-yes answer more understandable.

A friend was married at seventeen, and her husband was a year and a half older. Into that marriage have come eight choice spirits, and by all indications these children will be exceptionally fine young men and women. The two older children have entered college, and the oldest boy will likely enter the mission field by the end of this academic year. The husband-father has been a bishop and is now in a stake presidency. By all criteria I would classify this family as successful, even though the parents were relatively young at marriage. In your own life you can undoubtedly identify examples of successful marriages that started out at a relatively young age. If so, what are we to understand by early marriage?

By early marriage I mean the union between two people who have not had enough experience with life to have become prepared for marriage. Early marriage is marriage between immature people—people who are not spiritually, psychologically, or sociologically grown-up even though they may be physiologically mature. The relationship between chronological age and emotional and social maturity is such that a person in his early to middle twenties will more likely have reached a sufficient level of maturity to be successful at marriage than will a person who is seventeen or eighteen.

A critical sign of immaturity is a failure to know one’s own abilities and potentials. This failure to know oneself can be seen in the young child who must receive considerable encouragement before trying something that in fact he can easily do or in the child who enthusiastically starts piano lessons, loudly announcing his intention to play. He quickly finds that one lesson does not him a player make. He realizes that hours, days, weeks, and years will have to be spent in practice before he can play.

This failure to know oneself, along with a need to have things now, plagues early marriages and increases the disaster potential. I recently talked with a high school senior engaged to a high school junior, and both felt they must be married as soon as school ended. I asked what he planned to do to earn money for the new family. He didn’t have specialized skills but said he had a friend who operated a service station. He was sure he could get a job there. They both wanted the wife to finish high school during their first year of marriage. Further discussion revealed that the girl’s parents were deeply upset whenever the topic of marriage came up—which it seldom did in her home.

I came away from that discussion thinking, “Early marriage … immaturity … they think they must have marriage now because it will solve their problems … they don’t know themselves … their experiences do not equip them to meet the demands that society will make on that marriage!”

Early marriages are frequently made by socially immature people. By social maturity I mean having lived long enough to have become an accepted and respected member of important groups in a social space. Considerable research shows that people who are not accepted and respected as children and young adults in their own families have a more difficult time creating strong family ties in their own marriage and family life. The religious organization in any society is another important group. Being an accepted and respected member of this group reduces the disaster potential. The third critical group (especially for the husband-father) is that of occupation. The person who is not an accepted or respected member of this strata of society can expect to have a rather high disaster potential in any beginning marriage. In short it can be said that a marriage begun too early makes it difficult for that husband and wife to become accepted and respected members of important social groups. When this happens, the disaster potential of early marriage goes up.

It is easy to see why the above is true. Any marriage cannot exist for long in isolation in our contemporary world—even nations find it currently impossible. Any marriage needs other people outside of that marriage to help sustain and nourish it with recognition, encouragement, and help. But most importantly, members of a family need to give order and meaning to their existence. An important dimension of giving meaning to their existence is to create a spot for themselves that, in effect, tells them they are making important contributions not only to themselves but to others. This general feeling of self-worth comes largely from our association with other members of our family, our religious group, or our work worlds. No family is an island.

Realizing that conditions outside the marriage affect what goes on inside leads to another important conclusion. The younger people are at the time of marriage the more changing they will do as individuals in that marriage. Thus, two young people may be very similar and well suited for each other, but due to the great amount of changing that each will do, they will have a far greater chance of growing apart over the years. The older couple will have made more of their changes and can likely go through life retaining many of their feelings about self and many of the friends they had before marriage. Their basic religious beliefs will probably be retained and strengthened rather than fundamentally changed, and their occupational worlds will likely change little compared to the early married couple.

Let me give you some evidence from a study completed not long ago by Professor Kenneth L. Cannon at BYU, which points out many of the things I have been trying to say up to now. This particular study shows what a difference religious commitment makes to the success potential of a marriage. One group in the study consisted of those who, in a sense, did not hold an accepted and respected membership in the religious group (non-temple marriages) while the second group (temple marriages) did. By considering divorce as one indicator of the disaster potential in marriage, important information is contained in the following figures:

The non-temple marriages and the temple marriages were from similar social and educational levels. The findings of this study are consistent with what has been said in this answer up to now, namely, being an accepted and respected member of a religious group reduces the disaster potential of early marriages. Note that only 4 percent of those with temple marriages are divorced within 13 years compared to 33 percent of the non-temple marriages where the bride’s age is 17 or younger.

I’m reminded of the scriptural injunction that a person shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his mate, and they shall become one—not for a day or year, but for an eternal lifetime. Each person in the process of making the decision to leave father and mother must ask: Have I lived long enough and have I experienced enough of life to know my own abilities and potentials? Am I mature enough to know that much of what I want now can best be acquired by work and sacrifice today for a more meaningful tomorrow? Do I leave my mother and father with their blessing because I have earned their love and respect? Has my life to this point earned the acceptance, respect, and admiration of the Church in the persons of the bishop and the stake president, or, when I look at myself, do I honestly feel, “I am what I am, no more and no less. But I find it good because my father, the father of my ward, and my Father in heaven find me good.”

If these questions can be answered not with a boisterous and hollow yes, but with a deep, quiet affirmation coming from success with life and people, then the blessings of eternal lives shall flow unto you. Your decision to leave father and mother will not be an invitation to disaster but rather a promise of returning to the Father of all with those you love most.