Sooner or Later

I've been thinking about marriage a lot lately. Many of my peers have been getting married. Sometimes I feel young and adventurous and other times I feel like I would like to settling down. I've always wondered, when is the right time to get married in one's life? 

In college, I made a video with a friend that was for a campus discussion on sexuality and identity (It's Complicated). The idea was to discuss what it  means to be a Christian and yet have a sexual identity as an individual. We interviewed a psychology professor at our Christian college and also local Christian Reformed church pastor. The views were conflicting with each other.

The psychology professor said the trend in culture is to get married too soon in our lives (as of 2007, the average marriage age is 27.5 for men and 25.6 for women). She raised the point that the frontal lobe is not completely developed until a person's mid-twenties and that most people change during this time. She explained to us that people often want different things as their brain reaches final stages of development and so many people want something/someone else after they are already married.

The question my psychology professor then raised was, "How then are we supposed to express ourselves as sexual beings if we shouldn't get married until a little later in our lives?"

On the other hand, the pastor said that the trend in our culture is to get married too late in our lives. He raised the point that many people put off getting married because they are dating someone and want to make sure he/she is the right one. While dating, a couple is faced with their sexuality and finding a way to express it. It becomes easier to express their sexuality together and so the obvious happens before getting married. The pastor said that many couples live like this and think it is okay because it is under the radar. The truth is that God is not limited to this vision.

The pastor said that two people have a positive (and God pleasing) outlet for their sexuality when joined together in marriage.

I've had two years to process these viewpoints. I respected the psychology professor's view as much as I respected the pastor's view. I didn't lose sleep over the two opinions because I assumed they were both personal opinions; both true in their own relative nature.  

I finally decided that the answer was not relative- that their is an absolute right and wrong answer.

The truth has to do with giving up: we must give up the obsession of control. In pursuing the "right one," it easy to discard a good person when we think there is perfect person out there for us. When we realize marriage is not about the perfect one, that it is about making it work and giving of self, we can have a successful marriage.

I did my research and found that the average marriage age for a woman in 1900 was 22. The average age went up slowly until, from 1980 to 1990, the average age jumped up 2 whole years. However, the divorce rate also spiked, reaching its highest rate in history, during the 1980's and into the 1990's. It appears that there is some connection between marriage age and divorce rate; that, as marriage age goes up so does the divorce rate. Even though we now marry later in our lives (and supposedly have a fully developed frontal lobe), we marry with the wrong view and often fail to make the marriage succeed.

Many people look at marriage as a way to become happy. Finding "the one" will make them happy for the rest of their life. Then, after marriage for a given amount of time, he/she finds no more happiness and looks elsewhere or gives up.

C. S. Lewis provides an analogy to the proper view of marriage that fits here. Lewis said that you don’t get married to become happy, but rather to make the other person happy. Your own happiness is a by-product, a consequence, of maintaining the proper end. If, by contrast, you get married simply in order to make yourself happy, your true happiness is made that much more unlikely.

 In the end, we must remember that marriage is not first-most to provide personal benefit. Society convinces us to get married later because we are pursuing self-interests through marriage. Marriage is not about self-interests though.

In case you are wondering, the pastor we interviewed had the right answer, saying that we need to get married sooner in our relationships rather than later and, from there, learn to make things work as we go- with God's help of course.