All we like sheep

A year ago this month I got married. It was simultaneously hectic and wonderful. Like any important life event, it had its share of crises. For example, my family’s van broke down on Christmas day as we were driving to The Redhead’s neck of the woods. Life never lets things happen too easily. But after all was said and done, most things didn’t really change. We were still two poor young college students and we still had to return to real life and work and school. I think 23 is a very young age to get married, but we both knew it was the right thing to do so we took the plunge.

An article by the Associated Press this week called this to mind when it reported on recent findings by the Census Bureau about marriage in America. They reported that in 1970 the average woman was 20.8 years old when she got married and the average man was 23.2 years old. The figures for 2003 show that women now wait until they are an average of 25.3 years old and men wait until they are 27.1 years old. According to those numbers, I shouldn’t be married for another couple years. A separate study was done among people ages 20 to 24, finding what percentage had never been married. In 1970 it was 36% for women and 55% for men. Last year it was 75% for women and 86% for men. So as young Americans approach the proverbial “menace to society” point, the overwhelming majority of them still aren’t married. I find this to be a fascinating statistic.

When I got engaged I told several old friends the “good news.” They nodded politely and gave their congratulations but the look in their eyes and the tone in their voices clearly said, “Are you crazy? You’re not even out of your undergrad yet!” One or two of them were even so forthcoming as to voice their concerns. “Are you serious?” they asked. I assured them that I was indeed telling the truth. “Wow,” they said, “you’re brave.” They have always been supportive but skeptical of many of my life decisions, such as being a missionary for 2 years. They can tell it is something important to me, but they just don’t quite get it. Ultimately, they were very happy for me, but I could tell they were glad it was me getting married and not them.

Contrast that with every other Institute lesson, fireside, or talk from your bishopric in your singles’ ward, and you get a very confusing set of mixed messages. I think I can kind of understand why Church leaders hammer this point home so hard—if they don’t speak up and encourage people to get married, then people will probably listen to the world and keep putting it off in lieu of schooling or professions. However, it still bugs me sometimes how much we hear about marriage. When I was single it got to the point where I would whip out my Palm and start reading a book as soon as a speaker started delving into the trite marriage rhetoric. Heck, I am married and I get tired of it sometimes. But despite the sometimes-tactless delivery, I know that the Church leaders are more right than what society is telling us.

For me, getting married involved taking back a lot of nasty things I said about getting hitched. My freshman year I heard so many talks on the subject that my roommate and I banned the use of the “M” word from our dorm room. I swore I’d be 40 by the time I found someone with enough patience to put up with me for eternity. But just a few years later I found myself eating my own words as I met The Redhead. She helped me change my mind, using her Redhead Powers, so I’ve been taking all those things back every since. It still pains me a little to have fallen into the cliché, but my nonconformity urge wasn’t enough to keep me from taking the plunge.

I think conformity actually has a lot to do with it. Many of my friends probably see my choices as blindly following Church dogma like a stupid sheep. In their eyes, I went on a mission because I was supposed to, and I got hitched early because I was supposed to, and they’re probably expecting me to start having lots of kids immediately because I’m supposed to. (I’m sure that’ll come soon enough, but they’ll be sorely disappointed on that last one.) I see it as very ironic, because in reality it is they who are the blind followers. I did all that stuff because I truly wanted to; in fact, in some cases the pressure to do those things made me less inclined to do them. But my friends have all bought into society’s view of things. They wouldn’t think about getting married and having a family until they were done with their education, secure financially, with a good job and a home. Shoot, by the time I have all that I won’t even be able to have kids. As the AP article indicated, more and more people in America are buying into the notion that education and career come first, with marriage and family as an optional and inferior goal. Who’s the slave to conformity now?