Young Love

Day 94 (Written Thursday March 15) ~ When I met my wife I was 17 years old. When I married her I had just turned 19 two weeks earlier. In other words, I was a teenager when I got married. I’ve never loved anyone like I love her, but when I got married I was just a kid who knew nothing about life, love, marriage or maturity. That was nearly twenty years ago. Although we “made it” and I love her more than I did back then, I advise my sons not to get married so young.
I don’t believe there is an ideal age to get married or that a person is ever truly, fully ready to get married, but I do think you can be too young and unprepared. You may not agree with me, but it’s hard to argue with the statistics. Half of all teen marriages end in divorce, twice the average of other marriages. Most young people marry believing that love will be enough, not realizing that love doesn’t pay the bills, do the laundry or a dozen other things that are mundane parts of marriage and life. Truth is, love actually is enough, but few young people (and not nearly enough older people), understand what love really is.
In your teens, love is the feeling you get whenever they are around. Love is writing their name on your jeans, your book cover and your notebook. Love is staying on the phone with them for hours on end. These are wonderful parts of new relationships, but they aren’t love. Not real love. Not the kind that sustains two people over the decades and through all of life’s struggles. Love is longsuffering, kind, forgiving, it doesn’t keep a record of wrong doings, it isn’t arrogant or selfish and isn’t easily angered. Love requires maturity, and maturity is seldom a trait seen in youth.
One of the things that frequently sinks a marriage is selfishness. I advise young people to go off into life and live it before making the commitment to give their life to another. Too often a young marriage, having sacrificed goals and dreams of youth (college, travel, freedom, etc), will allow regret to take root and begin destroying the relationship. Marriage, and the family that usually follows, requires a tremendous amount of sacrifice and selflessness. You must put the other person ahead of yourself. Sadly many spouses, after years of this sacrifice, decide they want to stop putting others before self and begin doing things that are destructive to the family. The time to “find yourself” is before you get married. Be young, live life, figure out who you are and what you want, grow more mature and then when you meet the person you can’t live without, give them everything you have to give. Live for them.
A young marriage isn’t doomed to failure, and a marriage between to older people isn’t a guarantee of success. I wouldn’t change anything about our life and relationship, but my wife and I are an exception to the rule. We got lucky, we’re a little stubborn, we had a lot of help and along the way we learned together what it really means to love somebody.