The College Fix

The reliably brilliant Megan McArdle has a great article over at The Daily Beast on “The Many Cases for Getting Married Young”:

A college campus contains a very large number of single people with roughly the same life goals. For most people it is, indisputably, the last time you will be surrounded by such a large collection of eligible singles. What’s wrong with looking around to see if there’s one who might make a good husband? Or, for that matter, a good wife?

But somehow, we’re not supposed to say that, or even think it. These days, your 20s are not supposed to be for an “MRS degree” or starting a family; they’re for finishing your education and finding yourself. Marriage used to be the event that marked your passage into adulthood—the cornerstone of an adult life. Now it’s the capstone, the last thing you do after all the other foundations are in place…

For highly educated women who delay until they’re settled, the risk is that they will outrun their fertility—a small risk, but one that grows as education and career start consuming more and more of our youth. Anyone who has watched a friend struggle through rounds of fertility treatments will attest that when this small risk hits, it is emotionally catastrophic. For those who delay, it also means higher risks of birth defects, as well as the probability that couples will be sandwiched between the needs of infants and aged parents…

The full article is well worth a read. Check it out here.

Speaking from personal experience, as one who married at the young age of 22, I can say that it has worked out very well for me. And I’ve always felt fortunate that I avoided the long decade of singleness that so many of my friends have lived through during their twenties and early thirties. Didn’t hold my career back one bit. And, even if it had, it would have been worth it.

Unfortunately, our culture is making it harder and harder to marry young, even if you want to–as so many possible mates out there are single-mindedly pursuing degrees of questionable value and various aimless career paths, rather than looking to marry (a trend I wrote about recently.) It’s a problem exacerbated by credentialism and degree inflation, which forces people to go through more and more years of schooling to work the same kind of job that required less schooling years ago. All this comes at the expense of marriage. And, in fact, marriage rates are declining even among those who have no university education at all.

Well, my advice is–if you can–go ahead and buck that trend. Get married young. Odds are, you’ll be glad you did.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of the book SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.

Like The College Fix on Facebook.

Follow Nathan on Twitter @NathanHarden

(Image by Alan Turkus / Wikimedia Commons)