Does Getting Married Young Work for the Working Class?

The apartment stairwell was artificially bright, its concrete floors lit by buzzing lights, an incongruous backdrop for romance. Yet during our college years, we spent hours sitting on those stairs, our knees drawn up like children, our conversations ranging from philosophical, to infatuated, to angsty. Like the night not long before we got engaged, when Amber started questioning: “How do I know that I really love you?” 

Even then, at the height of falling in love, romantic love could cast its shadow, hinting at a potential for fickleness and fragility. 

We were 22 and 21 when we got married in May of 2009, captivated by the idea that by marrying we were giving our love its best chance at long life. This mindset—one that saw marriage as a stabilizing structure, more like a foundation from which to build than a milestone to achieve—was poignantly framed in a letter that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison in Nazi Germany in 1943 to his niece on her wedding day. "It is not your love that sustains the marriage,” he wrote. “But from now on, the marriage that sustains your love." 

In our twenties, we copied Bonhoeffer’s words into the cards we took to the weddings of our mostly Evangelical and Catholic friends and family, many of whom were also marrying younger than the norm. 

Shortly after our wedding, we began working together for a pro-marriage think tank. The first published article David wrote was a defense of early marriage. When we embarked on our first project, spending the summer in a working-class town in Ohio to investigate the class-based marriage gap, we found ourselves cheering for the young couples we were interviewing who were also doing the countercultural thing by getting married. 

What Marriage Means

Cassie, 22, and Austin, 20, were planning a wedding when we met them. Cassie worked as a receptionist at a car dealership, and Austin worked closing shift at a restaurant, and they were stressed about costs. When Cassie posted about it on Facebook, an entourage of family members commented, with advice ranging from “Slow down and don’t rush things,” to “Elope!” Grandpa even advised her to “live in sin” first, to which Cassie responded, “I’m already living with him, Grandpa.”

Some people wanted to travel and party while they were single, Cassie told us over drinks at The Yellow Rose, a country nightclub. She liked the song “19 and Crazy” but felt ready to trade that freedom for the “little rewards” of life with a husband and kids. The only travel on her bucket list had been a trip to North Carolina to visit her uncle. “I’ve done everything I wanted to do,” she shared. “My next journey is to be married and have a family.” 

Austin agreed. “Sometimes, while they’re partying,” he said of his peers, “they can pass up their soulmate completely.” 

“They all think they’ll be more mature when they hit 30,” Cassie added. 

Cassie hoped to be pregnant soon like her friend Liz, who was on the dance floor lip-syncing to the country hit, “Little White Church.”      

No more callin’ me baby
No more lovin’ like crazy
No more chicken and gravy
Ain’t gonna have your baby/’
Til you take me down to the little white church

Out of breath, Liz sat down next to her boyfriend Todd and teased, “I ain’t gonna have your baby until you walk me down the aisle!” They laughed, then she assured him, “Naw, I don’t want to get married yet. I don’t want to be fat when I wear my dress.” 

But Cassie felt differently. “We definitely want to be married before the baby.” 

“With marriage, there’s more of a special bond than there is just being together,” Cassie emphasized. “I’m going to be with him for the rest of my life, and I won’t ever lose him…. Basically, you become the same person, as the Bible says. Two become one, with the unity candle and all that.” 

But on the other hand, marriage was redundant. “Basically, the way we live right now—we’re pretty much married anyways,” said Cassie. 

“You don’t need marriage,” is how Austin put it. “People want marriage,” he added. “But marriage is really just a bond and so is love…. There is no difference; it’s pretty much a title.”

And yet he still desired that bond. “I want to say that I want to be with her for the rest of my life,” he told us. “Even though I’ve told her, I just feel like the actual paper statin’ that will, you know, just prove it more to both of us.” 

Austin paused, furrowing his brow: “I’m kinda contradictin’ myself.”

It was something that a lot of the young adults we interviewed puzzled over. Was marriage synonymous with love—and therefore the timing incidental—or was marriage something more?   

Following the Script

Their wedding was set for 2:00 p.m. at the picnic shelter of a nearby park. The guests were just starting to trickle in, helping tape down plastic tablecloths and arrange potato salad, baked beans, and mac n’ cheese on a table, while Cassie’s dad threw charcoal on the grill. Cassie, who was pregnant, wore a white maternity shirt, jeans, and flip-flops.

Around 2:20, Austin and his family arrived. Austin’s dad and his new girlfriend lingered at the edge of the pavilion, while Austin’s mom found a spot on the opposite end where his grandma sat chatting at a picnic table with her ex-husband. Exiting his black Camaro, Austin breathed in the warm fall air. “It’s a perfect day to go fishing,” he announced.

Cassie took command as best she could, making an aisle between picnic tables and trying to get people to sit down. Into the awkward silence before the ceremony began, Cassie’s father shouted, “Hope it lasts long!” And then Cassie grabbed his hand and walked down the aisle, the song of the sparrows their symphony. 

During our time interviewing working-class couples, we began...moving from an across-the-board cheering of early marriage, to asking, 'What will it take to replenish the social trust that sustains the marriage ecosystem?' 

When the minister asked the couple to repeat the vows, the familiar words came easily: “to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse.” But at “according to God’s holy ordinance,” Austin stumbled, laughing nervously with Cassie, and at “thereto I plight thee my troth,” he was really flummoxed. Someone hollered for the minister to repeat it, and everyone laughed, the kind of group laugh that eases the pressure when the setting is solemn and no one is quite sure how to act.

Because this was more than a good day to go fishing. The formality underscored a reality: Austin and Cassie were stepping into an ancient institution, following an old script. Standing before parents and grandparents who had divorced and remarried on repeat, until some were so bitter, they now declared that men suck and women were just in it for the buck, Austin and Cassie were insisting that what they were doing meant something. They wanted to be together the rest of their lives, a family unit, like Cassie’s parents who had married at 19 and pregnant, and were still married, an obtrusive accomplishment in that gathering. 

As Austin placed a sterling silver ring from the flea market onto Cassie’s finger, saying “with this ring I thee wed,” his face reddened, his eyes moistened, as did Cassie’s. 

“For whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” the minister declared. 

A gaggle of kids strung Mountain Dew and Coke cans to the back of the Camaro, while the adults joked that they were going to see which one goes first—her or him. 

“He’s got the ball and chain already on his leg,” one guy wisecracked. David asked him if had any advice for the newly married couple? He shook his head. 

 “Shoulda ran away.”

“You hear that, Austin? He says you shoulda ran away? What do you say to that?”

“Yeah, probably,” he said, taking a swig of his Dr. Pepper. “I’ll find out in the long run.” 

Can Marriage Still Work as A Cornerstone?

Psychologist Kai Erikson, who studied the Appalachian community of Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, wrote that “marriage is a community affair.” Think of marriage as a “gravitational field,” Erikson explained, in which the human particles that form the union are held together not only by the charge of their affection and love for each other, but also “by all the other magnetic forces passing through the larger field.” When those other magnetic forces lose their charge, the couple’s bond loses some of its charge. The assumption is that marriage is not a relationship a couple makes up on their own, but a social structure they receive from a community, and the community from its forebears. 

When we married, we walked into an already well-settled village, surrounded by the loving marriages of friends and family that we had always known, David hailing from the Old Order Amish and Amber from an intact family with no direct experience of divorce. The truth is, we were not brave pioneers laying a cornerstone in a vacant land, atop the ruins of lost love. No, unlike Cassie and Austin, we were just the latest in a long line of generations. 

We could resonate with Bonhoeffer’s quote about marriage sustaining love because it reflected the environment in which we were raised; and because we were the beneficiaries of the wealth of trust that our parents and grandparents stewarded with their loving marriages. For us, getting married meant stepping into a set of expectations and behaviors that signaled lifelong love and commitment—a belief mediated through word and example by those around us and bolstered by the practical support religious communities often provide.

But what if the forebears, the communities, no longer have an intact structure to pass down? 

Can Early Marriage Still Work Today? 

“They say that once you get married, it turns about 10 times worse,” Rob, a 24-year-old who was bussing tables and working construction, told David back in 2010. “People’s told me ‘Hey, don’t ever get married.’ All of a sudden, she’s gonna think she’s King Bitch. All of a sudden, she’s gonna think that she’s got control over you.” 

Rob and Julia had been together off and on since they were in the seventh grade. They were raising their two boys in a small, one-story home in a blue-collar neighborhood, and their ringtone was the country song, “Love Like Crazy,” about a couple that married at 17 and have “been together 58 years now.”

They wanted to get married someday, but they both stressed the importance of waiting. “I wanna make sure I’m ready for it,” Rob said, discussing how he needed to be stable and have a good job first. 

“We’re trying to plan ahead and not jump into something before we just do it,” Julia added. She noted that in many ways, it was like they were already married. But delaying gave them time to “double check.” 

“I don’t believe in divorce,” Rob said. 

I believe once you’ve become one that you’re always going to be one, that’s the way it should be…Live together, we die together type thing, you know, it’s forever-type deal. It’s not just one year down the road we’re gonna get divorced. But you see that happen so much that it’s almost sad…it’s almost sad to see children go through that—it really is. Kids shouldn’t have to see one parent being absent for the rest of their damn life because you know, ‘hey, we made this choice.’ 

For people like Rob, who have witnessed widespread divorce, marriage risks becoming a formative institution in an entirely unexpected way: it transmits anxiety rather than confidence, the fear that this could very well fail rather than the easy assurance of arriving at safe harbor. Precisely because marriage is a formative institution and a social undertaking, when marriages break down en masse, the effects are public. Marriage’s capacity to work as a cornerstone may become compromised. 

This is why, during our time interviewing working-class couples in Ohio, we began to see everything in a new light, moving from an across-the-board cheering of early marriage, to asking, “What will it take to replenish the social trust that sustains the marriage ecosystem?” 

Love Like Crazy

It wasn’t long before Cassie and Austin’s marriage began to unravel. Living with Cassie’s parents caused tension; they didn’t like Austin’s habits of smoking pot and driving too fast and eventually made him move back in with his mom. When his hours were cut at the restaurant, Austin started delivering newspapers, but Cassie didn’t trust him because the bills weren’t getting paid, and she suspected he was seeing an ex-girlfriend in those odd early hours. When a friend encouraged her to work things out with Austin, Cassie said that they had already agreed that “we were not meant to be.” 

By the time their daughter was born, Cassie was in the labor and delivery room with a new boyfriend. She hoped to be officially divorced by Christmas. 

A few years later, reflecting on the whirlwind of her first marriage, Cassie—now an experienced mom, college student, and hospital registrar—broke down as she talked about how insecure she’d been back then. An adolescence marked by bullying, an instance of sexual abuse by someone she thought was a friend, and the sense that she was “not high on the totem pole” meant that when Austin showed her interest, she lunged for his love, plunging headlong into the relationship. It was a common phenomenon. 

“Some people are looking just to escape loneliness,” one of Cassie’s peers had said. 

“Throwing themselves into relationships full force,” observed one woman. 

“They’re with that person because they’re there,” another agreed. 

“I just was always in a relationship, like I had to be with someone, but I didn’t have to love them,” said a woman who had put up with her ex-fiancée’s abuse. “I think it was just an insecure thing.” 

“I guess I never really had that love from a guy, like [my] dad, so I went somewhere else to find it,” said a divorced woman. “So I was always in relationships.”

If marriage is a weakened social structure, more of the burden is now on individuals to make sure they are mature adults of good character, well-prepared for the commitment of marriage before they step into it.

For Cassie and Austin, marriage became an outlet for healing broken selves, filling loneliness, stopping the spinning. Sure, Austin had zero financial stability to offer, but what’s more, neither he nor Cassie had any semblance of self-stability. Each with their own trail of trauma, they were seeking more basic needs: love, self-worth, belonging. 

It was a different kind of “love like crazy” than what country singer Lee Brice referenced in the hit that played on Rob and Julia’s phone. That was the kind of love we cheered in Austin and Cassie’s young marriage—the overturning of the tables on the cultural scribes and story peddlers who said to choose achievement over love, work over family, self over others. But there was another kind of love like crazy that Cassie’s story revealed, which happens when two broken people, each fighting personal demons, turn to romance and marriage to fulfill spiritual needs, overloading marriage with expectations it can’t possibly deliver. Driven by insecurity, the search for love takes on a heightened meaning, a frenzied pace: having sex when you first meet, moving in a couple days later, getting pregnant with a partner you barely know, getting married underneath a park pavilion four months after you meet. 

Becoming Trustworthy for Marriage

This was what Rob was trying to avoid. “I wanna make sure I’m ready for it,” he said, of marriage. Part of that was financial stability, but more than that, it was about making sure that he was stable. “My mind,” Rob said, tapping his temple, when asked what needed to be in place before he got married. “I don’t care what’s in place. I just wanna make sure I’m there. That’s what scares me. I wouldn’t wanna screw something like that up.” 

He looked behind us, to the waitress serving drinks. “I wanna make sure that I’m not looking at the waitress over there and checking out her ass.” He needed to be able to trust himself. “It don’t have to be a white-picket fence,” he noted. “I just wanna make sure everything is in place here for me,” he added, putting his hand on his heart. 

If marriage is a weakened social structure, for better and worse, more of the burden is now on individuals to make sure they are mature adults of good character who are well-prepared for the commitment of marriage before they step into it. Because with relatively easy recourse to divorce and higher standards for relationship quality, the institution is not as forgiving as it once was of partners who make mistakes.

Being ready for marriage requires that young people work on becoming trustworthy adults themselves. This cannot be boot-strapped but requires formation—which helps explain the demand among demoralized young men for life advice from figures like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Jocko, and others. 

“Jordan Peterson—the father many of us didn’t have,” commented one man on a video in which Peterson notes the fear young people have of marriage but goes on to say, “Be afraid of it. But don’t let that stop you from pursuing it.” On the other side of the media spectrum, a recent article in Cosmopolitan also encouraged readers to not “deprive themselves of [marriage] due to fear.”  

Any message [on getting married] must be mediated and accompanied by real-world support, especially for couples who have not had models of stable marriages growing up. 

Which brings us to the question Brad Wilcox raised in his recent essay: is the message “Get married young” a good one for our cultural moment, and in particular for the majority of Americans who are working-class? Would this message benefit couples like Rob and Julia who already share children and a home—by nudging them to make the commitment they may be more ready for than they think? Would it benefit couples like Austin and Cassie who marry young—by creating a culture that celebrates early marriage rather than stigmatizing it? Might Cassie and Austin have stayed together if the timing of their marriage hadn’t become the fodder for so many “I-told-you-so’s” that became self-fulfilling prophecies against life’s friction? 

We are still fans of early marriage, personally grateful for its blessings. But we wonder if there is something missing from the “marry young” message, which risks being as arbitrary as the opposite, “wait to marry until you’re 30.” The tricky thing about messaging is that different people, depending on circumstance and temperament, often need different messages. A message about marriage mindset—like the lines from Bonhoeffer—combined with an emphasis on becoming a trustworthy person for marriage, might be more universally relevant. And any message, of course, must be mediated and accompanied by real-world support, especially for couples who have not had models of stable marriages growing up. 

Rob, for all his doubt and deliberation, is still with Julia. They got married when he was 27 and have been married for over a decade. They are raising their sons and running small businesses. People who knew Rob in his younger days attribute much of his transformation to Julia’s presence. Rob also talks about the role of an older mentor and boss who trusted him with responsibility. Their story reveals both the wisdom of preparation and the potential good of early marriage, their lives having been intertwined since they were teenagers. The way in which their love has formed and kept them is evident.

Also evident is a social landscape in which there is more hope—and more real difficulty—than we might initially see.  

Amber Lapp is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a contributing writer at American Compass, and co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project. David Lapp is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project, and co-founder and director of the Citizens Commission on Immigration for Braver Angels. 

*Photo credit: Shutterstock