Marry: Sooner Rather Than Later/ Van Epp - 4/26/10

[Smartmarriages]

- MARRIAGE: SOONER RATHER THAN LATER

Here's a great article by John Van Epp ­ a preview of his Orlando Smart
Marriages keynote *It Takes a Village*.  You can train in both his How to
Avoid Falling for A Jerk and his Marriage Links programs in pre and post
conference training institutes - one pre-marital and one for married
couples, both based on his RAM (Relationship Attachment Model)...and among
the most highly-rated institutes at the conference.  See institutes #113 and
906 here: http://www.smartmarriages.com/institutes.html   - diane
 


Don't wait for marriage
 
Young adults should start searching for a spouse sooner rather than later.
By John Van Epp, PhD, President of LoveThinks, LLC  and author of How to
Avoid Falling for a Jerk.

Please respond to the questionnaire that immediate follows this essay.  

It was the end of my junior year of college and I was considering marrying
the woman of my dreams. My father questioned the wisdom of marrying so young
(even though he was even younger when he married my mother) but I reassured
him that we had come to deeply know and love each other over the last two
years and that we wanted to go through life together, starting right away. I
explained that we did not want to become "established" and then get married;
we wanted to go through that adventure together. And so we married the
summer before my senior year with little money, a tiny apartment, and
endless dreams of our future. Thirty years later, my wife and I are still
thankful that we made the decision to grow up together through our twenties.

But my father's apprehension in 1980 has become the trend of this new
millennium. In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out that
some sociologists argue that "early marriage" is the number one predictor of
divorce. They encourage young adults to explore their identity, work, and
love by delaying marriage and parenthood until their later 20s. They warn
that those who fail to postpone these family transitions miss out on better
career opportunities, make poorer choices on partners, and develop more
marital problems. Today the perception is that marriage takes more than it
gives with a good chance of ending in divorce. So, it shouldn't surprise you
that the median age for one's first marriage has shifted from the early
twenties in 1980 (my decision was the norm at that time) to 28 for men and
26 for women today.

It seems intuitive that age would bring maturity, stability, and better
decisions which would result in more lasting marriages. However, there are a
number of risks that work against these later marriages and question the
wisdom of this social trend to delay marriage into your 30s.

The starting point is a reconsideration of the claim that early marriages
contribute to higher divorces. There was a study conducted in 2002 by Tim
Heaton that did find high rates of marital instability associated with young
marriages, but the risks were with teen marriages. The impact that age had
on predicting marriage outcomes leveled off around age 21 with age making
little difference for those who marry between 21 and 30.

Furthermore, there may actually be increased risks associated with delaying
marriage to the end of your 20s or into your 30s. In another study conducted
in 2004 by the University of Illinois, Evelyn Lehrer suggested that the risk
of divorce decreased with each year from the teens to the early twenties,
but then the risk reversed and began to increase with each year after the
mid-twenties, offsetting the benefits of age and maturity with the
accumulation of harmful dating and sexual experiences. For instance, both
Heaton and Lehrer found that waiting to get married often leads to more
premarital sex, premarital cohabitation, and premarital births, which are
all associated with higher rates of marital instability. In addition, there
becomes a smaller selection pool as you reach your early 30s (e.g., by age
30, 75 percent of the population are married). At that point, the chances of
achieving a quality relationship lower because of the difficulty with
finding a suitable partner.

These risks are often overlooked because of a prevalent attitude today that
is quite dangerous and misleading: What you experience in one relationship
has no bearing on what will happen in a subsequent relationship. You could
call this relationship compartmentalization, where each relationship occurs
in its own compartment without any effect on another. I like to refer to
this attitude as "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." Obviously, this
cannot be true because what occurs in relationships, no matter how
insignificant, carries some measure of influence on you, the way you think,
and what you take into your next relationship. As scripture says in what is
both an encouragement and a warning, "You reap what you sow."

For the full article: http://tinyurl.com/33o3tfj
 
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