We’re Getting Married!
Ed and Ruth were watching the end of the evening movie on television when Ann came in with her boyfriend. Ann had dated Brad all during their junior year in high school and still liked him as they were starting their senior year. Ann was especially bubbly as they sat in the living room talking. She suddenly said, “Mom and Dad, we’re getting married!”
Ed and Ruth sat in stunned silence. Finally, Ruth said, “But you’re so young! You’re only seventeen and have high school to finish. Then there’s college, and maybe even graduate school.”
Ann protested, “We’re mature enough to have planned for all that. We both have part-time jobs after school, so we can stay in school. Brad is hoping for a basketball scholarship, and I should get an honors one. With the help we get from government grants and loans, we can make it without any problems.”
After a rather heated half-hour discussion, Ed concluded with, “You two just don’t know what it’s all about. It’ll never work. We won’t give our permission, and you can’t marry without it.”
Ann ended the conversation by saying, “In four months we’ll both be eighteen and you can’t stop us then. We’re getting married!”
It’ll Never Work!
Such an announcement strikes fear into the hearts of most parents. They have read the statistics: more than half of all teenage marriages end in divorce. Indeed, those marriages do end in divorce, but it is not just because of age. They have many other things against them from the beginning.
Those who marry as teenagers are the least likely persons to make a marriage succeed. They are often people who cannot wait to get what they want. They are also ones who do not conform to society and who expect too much from marriage. Many of the brides are pregnant, so the couple has to adjust not only to marriage, but also to parenthood. Some of them marry to get away from bad home situations only to wind up in worse ones. In general, if you were to try to find people who were least likely to make a success of their marriage, they would be the typical people who marry as teenagers.
After they marry, society makes it difficult for them to live. As we will see in a later chapter, money is usually a problem in teen marriages. If they are still in school, they have little money. When they want to work, they have difficulty finding jobs. When they are hired, it is most likely for temporary jobs with low pay. If you were to design an economic situation to make marriage difficult, you would make it like ours for teens.
In addition, just about everyone tells them that their marriage will fail. Parents and friends quote the latest rate of failure for teen marriages. We already saw the powerful effects of the self-fulfilling prophecy in which people act the way others expect them to. Then when the divorce comes, parents may not say it aloud, but they usually think, “I told you so.” The problem is not age as much as it is other factors.
Many people also believe other “facts” that are not necessarily true. Parents believe that children will soon come along. Of course, that is true if the bride is already pregnant, as so many are. However, it is not necessarily true if she is not. In fact, married teenagers may be more likely to use birth control than unmarried ones.
In their national probability sample of teenaged women, Melvin Zelnik and John Kantner (“Reasons for Nonuse of Contraceptives by Sexually Active Women Aged 15-19,” Family Planning Perspectives, 1979, 11, pp. 289-296) found that 65.8% of the pregnant unmarried women did not want their pregnancy. Among these, 85.5% did not use birth control when they became pregnant. They said they did not use it because they did not expect to have intercourse, circumstances prevented it, their partner objected, they thought it was wrong or dangerous, or they thought that sex was not as much fun with birth control.
Unmarried teens may also not use contraceptives because they think it means that their love is not “spontaneous.” That does not seem to bother married people. Also, some unmarried teens do not use it because taking such precautions implies that they are planning to be immoral, and they would rather think of themselves as being caught in the pressures of the moment.
Parents of married teens read the statistics on the birth defects and poor health of children born to teenagers. We must consider the fact that many of these children are born to unmarried mothers, who frequently get little prenatal care and live in poor conditions. Both of these can lead to problems in infants.
What would happen to the marriages of older people if they were the same kind of people who many as teens? What if all marriages started out under conditions of near poverty? What if at every wedding parents and friends told the bride and groom that their marriage probably would not work? Couples at any age would have difficulty making a marriage work under these circumstances.
Radical Celibacy
Although teen marriages worked for thousands of years, we now have a system of celibacy for everyone under eighteen. Celibacy literally means “a single life.” The dictionary defines a celibate as an unmarried person, especially one who has taken a vow not to marry. Protestants are sometimes critical of the Roman Catholic ideal of celibacy for the clergy, but they raise no voice against something even more radical—celibacy for a whole class of people during the time of their greatest sexual desire.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with celibacy. The Bible is clear that celibacy is good. The Apostle Paul said, “It is good for a man not to marry” (1 Cor. 7:1). He went on to say, “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am” (1 Cor. 7:8). In the times Paul was living he could say, “He who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does even better” (1 Cor. 7:38). Jesus Himself is another example, for He lived His entire thirty-three years without marrying.
Certainly celibacy is not wrong, but in our creation of adolescence we have something even more radical. Celibacy, according to its definition, often involves a vow by the celibate person. We do not even give adolescents that choice. We tell them that for the first six or eight years of their adult lives, they cannot legally marry. Furthermore, we seem to believe that we will get chastity if we enforce celibacy.
Chastity means “purity.” The dictionary defines chastity as refraining from all unlawful sexual activity. Unfortunately, our laws have produced celibacy without chastity. Our adolescents are unmarried, but as we saw in the last chapter, most of them are not abstaining from sexual activity.
The Bible is also clear that celibacy is not for everyone. The passages on celibacy are followed by a clause beginning with “but.” Consider the first two passages quoted above. “But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband” (1 Cor. 7:2). “But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9). Paul is clear about his solution to the problem of premarital sex. It is marriage.
When His disciples made their statement about not marrying, Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this teaching but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it” (Matt. 19:11-12). This is not an easy passage to understand, but it appears that Jesus saw celibacy as good, but as a special gift. Not everyone should be celibate.
Cultures like ours were anticipated by Paul. “They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain food, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth” (1 Tim. 4:3). He was very specific about encouraging younger widows to marry, as he emphasized in the next chapter.
Give proper recognition to those widows who are really in need….No widow may be put on the list of widows unless she is over sixty, has been faithful to her husband….As for younger widows, do not put them on such a list. For when their sensual desires overcome their dedication to Christ, they want to marry….So I counsel younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their homes and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander. (1 Tim. 5:3, 9, 11, 14)
Some people today argue that chastity prepares people for “more emphatic experiences of sexual release.” This may be true when talking about a matter of hours or days, but it hardly applies to the years of adolescence. This same line of reasoning would say that we should starve adolescents so that they would enjoy their food more when they got it or that we should cut off their air so they would appreciate odors more.
Anyone knows that when too hungry, people simply wolf down their food, not even enjoying the delicate tastes. People who have nearly suffocated do not notice the subtle odors in the air they breathe, they are simply interested in gulping as much air as possible. Similarly, there is no evidence that years of adolescent chastity makes sex any more enjoyable later in life.
Not allowing newly matured adults to be sexually active is, in principle, like passing a law against allowing children to walk until they are eight years old. We could tell them that they were not old enough to walk. If they wanted to walk, they would have to walk secretly. We can only imagine the effect of that on their walking when they became adults. Likewise, we can only speculate about the effect of not allowing normal sexual expression during the first six to eight years of a person’s adult life.
The problem is not that sexual feelings occur too early in our culture, but that because of adolescence, weddings occur too late. The biblical answer to the sexual problems of teenagers was to not have adolescence. The church has accepted our culture’s invention of adolescence, but it has not told its adolescents what to do with their sexual desires.
They Don’t Know What It’s All About!
As parents you may look at your teenagers and say that someone that age with so little experience cannot know what marriage is all about. You think, “Having an adolescent picking a marriage partner is like having someone who has never driven buy a car.” You are right! Such a person may buy a car that is pretty and rides well, without considering how long the car will last or how well it will run under difficult conditions. You have lived in a marriage relationship and believe, quite correctly, that you know more about picking a marriage partner than do your adolescents who have no experience as spouses.
Of course “courtship” used to be quite different from what it is now. For example, when Abraham decided it was time for Isaac to marry, he called his chief servant and said, “I want you to swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my own relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac” (Gen. 24:3-4).
The servant agreed and went to find Isaac a wife. When he had found the woman and explained his mission, her father said, “Here is Rebekah; take her and go, and let her become the wife of your master’s son, as the Lord has directed” (Gen. 24:51). Isaac and Rebekah were not “in love,” but they had many other things more important in a marriage. (The “love” came later. Remember that it was Isaac and Rebekah who were caressing, or sporting, or petting, when Abimelech looked out his window.)
As we read this account, we find that they came from good families where their parents served God. She was beautiful, a virgin, industrious, and hospitable (vv. 16, 19, 25). When the servant set out to convince her parents that she should marry Isaac, he talked about God’s blessing and Abraham’s (Isaac’s father) material wealth (v. 35). We might think that Rebekah would be hesitant to marry a stranger whom she had never met, but that was not the case. When Abraham’s servant wanted to leave right away, her mother wanted her to stay another ten days.
“Then they said, ‘Let’s call the girl and ask her about it.’ So they called Rebekah and asked her, ‘Will you go with this man?’
“‘I will go,’ she said” (Gen. 24:57-58). Then they left immediately.
All of this seems very businesslike to us who emphasize romantic love. The marriage brokers of the Romans looked at such things, and we need to as well. We often forget that marriage is a legal contract, one more binding than any other in our society. People cannot legally enter this contract without permission from the state—a license. They cannot enter the contract unless it is approved by another person—the minister or justice of the peace. The contract must be observed by two others—the witnesses. When they enter this contract, each becomes responsible for nearly everything the other person does—such as buying on credit. They cannot break the contract without permission from the state—a judge. And sometimes there are legal obligations even after the contract is broken—alimony and child support.
Today we use the “trapping model” of courtship. I used to run a trap line and I see many of the same techniques used in trying to catch a mate. First, the trap must be in the right place. Some people set it in a singles bar, others in a church. Second, the trap must be hidden. People try not to be too transparent with the one they are trying to catch. Third, the set must look just right. Hair sprays, makeup, clothes, and shoes are sold to make teens look “irresistible” to the ones they are trying to catch. Finally, the bait must smell right. Deodorants, mouthwashes, soaps, breath mints, perfumes, and colognes are the final touches to make teenagers smell right.
Parents used to match people who would be good spouses, and they would grow to love each other. Today adolescents pick someone they “love,” then try to make them into good mates. Unfortunately, you cannot love someone you do not really know. You do not really get to know a person until you have lived with them for some time, and marriage in our society is often not strong enough to keep people together for that love to grow. Of course, the meaning of “love” has changed. When adolescents say they love each other, they usually mean they find each other attractive, not that they want to give themselves for each other.
Unfortunately, we often take more care in picking a business partner or a vocation than we do in picking a spouse. We may carefully investigate a business partner, but we pick a spouse on the basis of romantic love, then enter a legal contract with them. Yet the two major problems in most marriages are sex and money. We pick a mate who is sexually attractive, and then find that we are not sexually satisfied. Looking at how they handle money seems too businesslike to be considered in courtship; then we are unhappy when their values are different from ours.
Teenagers today need to be even more careful in choosing a mate than people were in the past. People live much longer today than they did even a century ago, which means that marriages last longer. When people died at an average age of forty or fifty years of age, it meant that most people did not live together nearly as long as they do now. Most people did not live together long after the children left home. Today marriages often last forty or fifty years.
Living Together
One thing that our society has developed to try to improve mate selection is living together for a trial period before marriage. More than a million and a half couples were doing this in 1980. They believed that this would ensure that they would marry only people they knew they could adjust to. They also believed their marriages would be happier because the problems that usually come up early in marriage would have already been worked out. They would have decided on how to share the household chores, the frequency of sexual activity, how to make decisions, and so forth.
Although all of this sounds reasonable, it simply does not work. Many studies have been done comparing such couples with others who have not lived together before marriage, and most have found no differences in their marriages. The satisfaction with marriage is about the same, and the divorce rates are about the same.
Sociologists Alfred DeMaris of Auburn University and Gerald Leslie (“Cohabitation with the Future Spouse: Its influence upon Marital Satisfaction and Communication,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1984, 46, pp. 77-84) of the University of Florida believed that if they did a good enough study they could show that living together before marriage led to a better marriage. They picked their couples very carefully so that they were mostly not college students and all had been married from one to two years. They used a test of marital satisfaction that was more sensitive than others had used.
After analyzing the data from nearly 300 couples, they found the opposite of what they had expected. Both husbands and wives had lower marital satisfaction if they had lived with each other before they married than if they did not. Even after controlling for “sex-role traditionalism,” church attendance, and everything else they could think of, they found that those who lived together before marriage showed less satisfaction. DeMaris and Leslie finally concluded that people who are willing to live together before marriage do not make good marriage partners.
What Can Parents Do?
As we have seen, teen marriage was not a problem in Bible times. People accepted it and saw marriage as a solution to the problem of premarital sex. This is reversed today. Most people in our culture frown on early marriage and consider premarital sex acceptable.
Of course, adolescence is far more than simply forbidding marriage of people under eighteen. As we have seen, our culture has removed identity from teenagers. As we will see in later chapters, our culture discriminates against adolescents so that they cannot support themselves. It also requires them to spend many years in school.
We seem to assume that the way we do things now is an advance over the past, but the bulk of the evidence indicates that we are doing far worse than people did in the past. We should ask ourselves whether our system of courtship and marriage works. It clearly does not. When we look at the divorce rates, we see that as we have adopted our modern customs, the long-term success of marriage has declined. Let us consider some things parents can do to help their offspring’s marriages succeed.
Treat each one individually. We have been told so often that teenage marriages are bad that we hardly believe they can succeed. If we look for recent sociological or psychological studies that teenage marriages are good, we are not likely to find many. Our culture has stacked the cards against their success. But we have the evidence from thousands of years that early marriages can work. We should not automatically reject the idea of teenage marriage, but consider each case individually.
This means not that we should encourage teen marriage but that it is not necessarily bad. Many teenagers are not socially mature enough for marriage. We have expected them to act like children, and they do. If we had expected them to act like adults, many of them would be mature enough to marry, just as people were in the past. If most teenagers are not socially mature enough for marriage today, it is not their fault but ours.
Some parents face the very difficult problem of their adolescent dating someone they strongly believe is the wrong person. Marriage is the most important choice people make at the human level. If they choose the wrong college, they can transfer. If they choose the wrong job, they can quit. Although our culture would have us think it is the same with marriage, it is not that simple.
The law gives you power over your adolescents, but you have to earn their respect. Respect is based on competence, wisdom, and experience. It is the “honor” referred to in the fifth commandment: “Honor your father and your mother” (Ex. 20:12). Power, on the other hand, is based on force. Respect requests, but power demands. People I respect have more influence on my life than those who have only power.
If you believe that your adolescent should not marry, use the respect you have earned rather than the power the law gives you. You have the power to tell your seventeen-year-old he or she cannot marry, but it will be better if you can delay the marriage using the respect your son or daughter has for you. If you command, they may wait only until they reach the age limit, then marry. If you are divorced, you may have a particular problem in this area. The teenager may think that you have messed up your own life and have nothing to tell them about love and marriage. If this is the case, you may have to call on power or convince your teenager that she or he can learn from your mistakes.
Teach them what it’s all about. You were right when you said that they do not know what marriage is all about, but it is up to you to teach them. This means education for marriage in its broadest sense. It includes sex education as well as how to get along as a spouse. In this section we will consider sex education, and we’ll discuss getting along in a later chapter.
At this point, you may be thinking, “My adolescents have no trouble talking about sex, I’m the one! I can hardly bring up sexual topics, and when they do come up, I get all tongue-tied.”
Perhaps you were raised in a home where sexual activity of any kind was not discussed. You did not talk about it as a child or adolescent, so you find it difficult to discuss it as an adult. Not only do you find it hard to talk about with your own children and adolescents, but with other parents as well. The last two chapters may have been difficult to read. You may even find it hard to discuss sexual matters with your spouse.
You should work toward becoming comfortable discussing sexual matters. If you feel uncomfortable about it, the first thing to do is to determine why. If the problem is that you are unsure of your sexual knowledge, get some books on human sexuality and study them. Since many colleges now offer courses on human sexuality, many good books are available. Taking a course in it may help you too.
If the problem is that you feel guilty, ashamed, or sinful when you talk about sex, you need to do two things. One is to learn and become convinced that sex is not shameful or sinful. In the past when Christians talked about sex, they seemed to major on sex as sin rather than on the positive things about it. You can counter this by studying the positive things the Bible has to say about sex. Reading the positive books mentioned in chapter 6 will also help.
Of course, changing your thinking will not automatically change your feelings of shame or guilt. These are learned responses, so the second thing you need to do is to unlearn them. The only way to get rid of these is to openly discuss sexual topics. Discussion with your spouse will help. Discussion with other parents who feel the same way will help. This can be done in a class on human sexuality at a college or in church. By the end of an evening, you may feel more comfortable, but later the old feelings will come back. You need to have such discussions several times, until the old feelings of shame and guilt are gone. Discussions about sex will probably never become casual, but they need not produce shame and guilt.
You may wonder when to start educating your children abut sex. A copy of Playboy was confiscated in the first grade of our local elementary school. If you waited until your children were in school, you waited too long. Sexuality education series begin with books for preschool children and follow that with several others for older ages. Get a book appropriate for your children or teens and begin immediately.
Another problem is how to bring sexual topics up for discussion. If you are open with your children and adolescents, such questions will arise naturally. One of our children came home from third grade asking what a four-letter word written on the rest-room wall meant. It was the perfect opening to discuss sexual intercourse more fully and give a wholesome perspective on it.
If you read the Bible in your family devotions, sexual questions will arise, especially if you read a modern translation. Sexual material is not always as concentrated as in Leviticus 18-20, but the New Testament as well as the Old Testament does not ignore human sexuality. Reading Christian sexuality education books with (not just giving them to) your children and adolescents will open many topics. For example, the Concordia series has books for children and adolescents of various ages as well as for parents.
As parents of modern Western society you are not responsible for picking mates for your teenagers, but you are responsible for teaching them how to pick mates and how to be mates. Often adolescents seem to look only at whether or not the person is attractive (the trapping model). They may concentrate on whether the person looks and acts sexy. Does the person “turn them on”? Unfortunately, they may not even look at what the person will be like to live with. They may not consider the person’s family or how he or she manages money. They may not watch to see how the person responds when everything seems to go wrong.
Steve came home from a backpacking trip with the church youth group and said, “I think every guy interested in a girl should go backpacking with her.” He had been interested in Judy, but on the trip she had complained about everything. Steve did not mind legitimate complaints, but she complained about everything from the weather to the walking—things no one could do anything about. He new knew he would never want to live with her.
Help them make it work. If your teenagers who are of legal age are going to marry against your better judgment, support it. Your continued opposition will only make their marriage more difficult, less likely to succeed. Make sure that both of them understand that they are making a lifetime commitment. Expect the best, remembering how important your expectations are.
If they have not known each other very long, encourage a long engagement. Get both sets of parents together and make sure the adolescents see any differences in the value systems of the two families. Help them realize that a marriage is between two families as well as between two individuals.
Encourage them to get premarital counseling from a trusted minister. See if they will attend an “engaged discovery” weekend at church where they will be with others who are intending to marry. They can compare themselves with others there and may take what is said there more seriously than what you say.
Remember that teen marriages are not doomed. They worked for thousands of years and many still work today. If your teens are over eighteen, they can marry without your approval. Even if they are under eighteen, if they are mature and both sets of parents support it, the marriage has a good chance of success.
2005 Update
I do not know of any data appearing in the last 20 years that would change this chapter.