A little while back Mark Ragnerus wrote a piece in the Washington Post that got a lot of response. The question is whether it’s good for society that we marry later and later. Ragnerus thinks not:

Third, the age at which a person marries never actually causes a divorce. Rather, a young age at marriage can be an indicator of an underlying immaturity and impatience with marital challenges — the kind that many of us eventually figure out how to avoid or to solve without parting. Unfortunately, well-educated people resist this, convinced that there actually is a recipe for guaranteed marital success that goes something like this: Add a postgraduate education to a college degree, toss in a visible amount of career success and a healthy helping of wealth, let simmer in a pan of sexual variety for several years, allow to cool and settle, then serve. Presto: a marriage with math on its side.

Too bad real life isn’t like that. Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life. “Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth,” added Tennyson to his lines about springtime and love.

A lot of the debate over whether or not Ragnerus is right or wrong depends on how stridently you believe that he makes his case. A lot of the people making the most pointed criticisms say that he’s arguing that people need to just find the nearest partner and get married (no, he’s not). A lot of Ragnerus’s defenders are saying that he’s only making the point that people that are in loving, committed relationships should not put off marriage (no, he’s saying a lot more than that).

Ragnerus’s point, as I read it, is that society has decided that marriage is something that comes after we’ve had our years of self-discovery and have established ourselves independently and that this is not a positive social development. This nebulous concept of self-discovery doesn’t help and may hurt long-term marriage prospects when it takes up prime reproductive years and that it can make us less amenable to the bonding that marriage should entail because we have already so firmly established ourselves as individuals.

I am of a mixed mind as to whether or not Ragnerus is right. When I was living in the Mormon west, I got to see an American subculture that is as Ragnerus wants it to be. Marriage is utmost on the concerns of people years before it is in the urban and suburban south where I came from. Deseret’s rates of marriage success and failure is midling, which is impressive when you consider the frequency of marriage out there and the young age at which people get married… but it also makes the case that strong social institutions and young marriages are not enough to “save” marriage.

My main objection to Ragnerus is that even if he is right and that it would be better if we all married younger, such a cultural shift would be very hard to institute. Ragnerus himself notes that there is a stigma to younger marriage (Deseret being a conspicuous exception). An individual that decides to buck this trend needs to find another individual deciding the same. They’re going to be looking for things that their contemporaries are not. If you’re a 21 year old looking for marriage, unless you’re Mormon (or similarly religious) or in a sub-culture where college degrees are scarce, you’re going to scare people away with talk like that.

Beyond that, young people today simply aren’t equipped to find a life partner at that age. They often don’t have a clear idea of what to look for. Tell a 21-year old to start looking for a wife and he will probably use the same criteria he uses to find a girlfriend. That has the potential for a lot of problems.

On the other hand, if you tell them at 18 that they need to find someone by 23, you’re likely to get better results. They’re more likely to start appraising people more on their marry-worthiness rather than how hot, exciting, or fascinating they are. Then the trial and error of the college years may well produce people with a much better idea of what they want and don’t want when they get married. Right now, the college and post-college years are spent pursuing people that they want to be with either in a casual sexual relationship or a tentatively exclusive one. In the latter case, the sort of relationship where marriage might happen someday, but there’s no rush and it’s more about enjoying the here-and-now.

A lot of my thoughts on this (of course) go back to my own experiences. I almost got engaged at the age of 22 or so and that marriage would not likely have been a happy one. Further, my partnership with Julie was not founded on how hot or exciting she was. The criteria I used was the criteria everyone is told to use when looking for a spouse. She was pretty, but she was also warm (to me at any rate), loving, kind, loyal, likely to be a good mother for future children, and so on. Had I acted on those impulses, though, it would have been disastrous because she was lacking other things that I didn’t realize were important. It was when I was gearing up to engage that the sheer horror of our future together started to set in.

So the question I ask myself, when considering Ragnerus’s proposition, is whether or not in a society that pushes young marriages I would have gone forward. Two years in, things were wonderful for us and I might just have plunged ahead. If so, then I cannot possibly endorse Ragnerus’s ideas. But it’s also possible that had I been keeping an eye on marriage from the start, it’s possible that I would have noticed everything that was missing from our equation and moved on a lot more quickly, looking for my future Clancy or whoever else I might have ended up with. It was, after all, the notion of marrying her that dislodged her from my life. But those observations were made in a social atmosphere where becoming engaged at 22 or 23 was considered foolhardy despite over four years of couplehood.

I go back and forth.

One last thing to mention is that some people are saying that people shouldn’t get married until they are personally ready and that this should be considered a personal, not a cultural, issue. I disagree with this pretty strongly. First off, as I mentioned above, if you’re going against the grain you’re likely to have a lot more difficulty finding a partner. Second, as Ragnerus notes, peer pressure is a huge issue.

It’s a lot less to be in a committed relationship when none of your friends are. It was a real issue in my life during the Julie years. My friends were all talking about going out and finding someone and who they were interested in and all that and there I was at the table with little to contribute because I’d already found someone. That didn’t play any significant role in my leaving Julie, but it did contribute to the notion that I was missing out on someone much better out there and at least I was missing out on going out with the guys and doing single guy things. Now, as it turned out, I was missing out on someone better (Hi, Clancy!). But I am pretty sure I would have had those feelings even if I hadn’t been. But now, here I am nearly a decade later, and most of my friends are also married or cohabitating with someone that they are likely to marry. It would suck, suck, suck to be single now… at a time when our marriages (and such) are part of our common experience.