So many new choices and possibilities for young women since the 1970s, and so much ink and angst spent dissecting it all. What almost never occurs to anyone, perhaps because we dread aging so tend see the aged as a different, lesser species, is to ask women who've lived through it how it all turned out. Think "motherhood" and what comes to mind? Chubby babies and Christmas card family photos? Pumping breast milk at the office and arranging play dates? Doing piles of mud stained laundry and bringing crock pots of food to the team awards night? Endless variations but they usually involve the busy years of young family life. Years single women the same age may be lonely, collecting different experiences. But what happens next is important too. Do those children and husbands stick around and maintain meaningful connections throughout a woman's whole life? Or is she temporary support, a waystation for others' experiences and dreams? Which came first, women's liberation as a woman's choice or a modern individualism that permitted men to replace old wives with new, children to move far away and visit infrequently if at all and relegate the unsightly elderly to nursing homes? Among my women peers, now in their 50s and up, there's not much difference in daily life between those who had children and those who didn't. (This is less true of working class friends and colleagues who tend to be more involved with grandchildren and extended family, not always under the best circumstances but with what seems like more mutual loyalty.) There's a dramatic rise in family estrangement, so painful for mothers especially. At some level, girls and women know their whole lives that we will likely become our mothers. What does that role represents to us? Someone who is revered or at least appreciated and cared for or someone who is a burden and annoyance to be avoided? That view of elder motherhood should and does, if only subliminally, help inform our choices.
Thanks for this essay, successful because the thoughtfulness and nuance of the writing inspires a consideration of our own twenties.
My wife and I married in 1985 when we were 23 after meeting a year earlier. So we never had the experience of being single in our twenties. But neither of us ever had the sense of doors being shut.
It's been a grand adventure for the past forty years. Of course we've had our share of "life," in the form of issues and heartache and fights. And with three children, like all parents except liars, we've made our share of mistakes, some funny and some not.
I'm as excited about our life together now as I was forty years ago. I don't know if that makes us an exception or not.
Beautiful essay. Something that occurred to me as I was reading is how we make life needlessly complicated by asserting these strict binaries. What if Simon and Eileen just kept dating? What if they had nurtured a real, stable relationship, and then married when the time was right for them? It's easy to romanticize young marriage, but the stats are what they are. Folks who get married in their early twenties are at a significantly higher risk of divorce. Anyone who has come out on the other side and reached their late twenties and beyond knows why: the things we worry about, the anxieties and immaturities we possess, not to mention the financial instability, make for a powder keg. Something levels out as we get older. We realize that the silly things we used to worry about don't matter. Call me a romantic, but you can still have enriching, exciting experiences with a loving partner by your side. It doesn't have to be "either/or."
I think that using single=experience/marriage=stability as two poles for how to choose life is somewhat arbitrary. Stability, in many ways, underwrites the success of both modes of living. Being single with stability often means that moving to New York or backpacking around Europe becomes an Epcot adventure as long as there is a safety net to fall back on. If someone has landed a tony, artistic job, I’m guessing that this person has a safety net (upper middle class or wealthy parents.)
By the same token, getting married without any kind of safety net, for whatever combination of motives (love, survival, escape), can leave both members of the relationship shoulder deep in “experience”. The experience of struggling to find a place to live, pay rent, eviction if you can’t pay rent, trying to build stability when it isn’t given is, in most senses, more of an “experience” than say, going to Paris.
Agree! I’ve always wanted stable love, married twice, now 52 with two abusive marriages behind me and three grown or near-grown sons. I still crave a wing to be under … even though I’m tons stronger than most men I know. “Choosing” may not mean what you think it means, because you never know what you choose. I do know a loyal, stable, exclusive, sacred-bond-based relationship was/is my right path, even if we humans are so rarely up to the challenge.
With respect, many women are insecure, atomized, and unfulfilled not because they forewent young marriage, but because basically everyone not-affluent is feeling those things. Most of the structures of social life in the anglosphere are aimed at separating people: eliminating public spaces, eliminating safe and comfortable shared living spaces, eliminating opportunities and resources for spending casual time, eliminating the natural world, commoditizing and siloing hobbies, pathologizing non-productive behavior, and on and on. Marriage and nuclear family aren’t the ultimate source of security and social connection, they’re an inadequate consolation in an atomized dystopia. And they are only still encouraged because they satisfy the productivist necessity for reproduction of labor. (Wrote on this here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/08/seinfeld-and-friends-reflected-the-atomized-u-s-of-the-90s-and-today) Marriage and nuclear family are not fringe pursuits; a considerable majority of people end up in these structures because in a lot of places that's all that's left to achieve a feeling of social connection and security. People pining for meaning, safety, and security and thinking that it belongs only in the utopia of nuclear family because their parents and grandparents were married and also generally secure, are committing a false cause fallacy. They were secure because they grew up in the biggest middle-class expansion in history, which gave them time and financial security, and which is now in probably permanent retreat. Universal marriage won’t solve that, ask any historical peasant.
I fully agree! Community and connection is not only attainable through a nuclear family. It is funny how many people seem to “feel” the same problem (some variant of lack of meaning) but some revert to “we need to go back to nuclear families - that will solve all” while others pivot to more experiences, but somehow the real elephant in the room is not properly addressed.
Thank you for this article. It's put into words very accurately the "idolatry of experience" that I've gradually become aware of since my college years. It's very comforting to me that people are starting to independently wake up to this reality.
If I may make some observations from the Catholic tradition of Christianity, much of which is shared by other Christians...
St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, made "happiness" (ευδαιμονία) the centerpiece of his moral theology. This tradition of thought believes that the human person - and all lifeforms, in their own way - desires the Good by nature. To desire is to desire the Good: you literally cannot desire anything else. Happiness is the fulfillment of this desire. The question then becomes whether and how far this desire can be fulfilled.
Keeping on the worldly level, Aristotle basically saw this fulfillment of desire as the attainment of wisdom: to grasp truth about reality, including oneself. Because this wisdom is what enables living the good life. Happiness comes ultimately from living a good life. Further, with other Greek philosophers, the task of philosophy was to be able to die well, and to die well was to be wise and good by the end of your life. Not successful, not well known, not powerful, not wealthy, and not "experienced."
Now, a generous reading of the cult of experience is that, actually, people are trying to gain experience for the sake of what Aristotle and other Greeks believed was the point of life. However, the operative concept of experience lacks a workable concept of the Good. Without this, experiences cannot really be evaluated as beneficial or not, so there's no directionality (τέλος) that can put bounds on what people are pursuing. With the proper directionality, even bad experiences can be seen into growing in wisdom.
So what's it all for? If that question can't be sufficiently answered, we have a recipe for despair.
Now Aquinas, as a Christian, found Aristotle's framework pretty helpful, because he could say the Good = God. And Aristotle would agree with this, even though his concept of God would be very different. If the Good = God, then in some mysterious way, what everything and everyone is pursuing is in fact God. And not just that, but the happiness that is a sharing in God's own life because of a certain proportion of goodness.
This doesn't mean that there are not many legitimate happinesses, even very fulfilling ones, along the way, but fundamental to the gospel of Christ is that you are simply never going to find true happiness this side of the veil: you were made for more. And in fact, the pursuit of happiness separated from the ultimate happiness we were made for in God will actually lead to undermining our own good: to be satisfied with a lesser good is to thwart attainment of the Good. Hence, Jesus: "Seek first the kingdom of God, and all else will be granted to you." There is an ordering of pursuit that makes life worthwhile.
So, that's how I read all of this. If anyone else finds this helpful, great. 🙏
i think marilynne robinson once said something like, “Might we not all have been kinder and saner if we had said that discontent is our natural condition…”
As someone who chose art and independence over marriage and family, and who feels, at 39, incredibly fulfilled by that choice, I refuse to cede happiness to those who married young. And as someone who has been on the receiving end of much resentment from married mothers at work and in my social circle (jealous I could go back to school in my 30s, or travel, or simply seem fulfilled) I think this essay, while elegantly written, presents a false binary. Experience comes in many forms, as does happiness, and if we’re lucky, we get to work at them all our lives.
Beautiful essay. I admired the writing and how it engaged the topic while still doing justice to the novel. What I found really interesting is how it questions the liberal worldview while still using a somewhat classically liberal framework–the idea that everything is a choice, i.e. “I chose experience, but I could’ve chosen marriage and family. Did I choose wrong?” Never in my life did I think “having experiences” mattered and yet I was also very poor and lonely in my 20’s despite being quite religious at the time. Not seeing all of life as a choice, I usually blamed God or late capitalism. I would have to examine my life quite carefully to separate out the choices from the circumstances, and I would probably be wrong anyway. I’m reminded of a Dear Sugar column from many years ago about the “Ghost Ship”--the ship represents the lives we didn’t lead, “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” She also frames it as a choice, but acknowledges we’ll never know if that life would’ve been better, only that it was “important and beautiful and not ours.” I think if traditional views have anything going for them, it’s not to get some “better” life–although that could happen–but to have the inner resources to accept whatever does happen.
I married at 22 under the guise of a christian worldview. It did not last. Neither did the next one. I've had my times of independence and my times of seeking love. It's an impossible question looking back because from the seat of 49 an affectionate wing would have done me a world of good and goddess do I desire it... but here's the rub: I could not withstand such a relationship because it ran counter to the beliefs encoded in me through a desperately traumatic childhood. I share this because I don't think we have the choice we think we do. I loved love but could not love. And I can only say that 26 years later.
How many partnerships begun young are this "affectionate wing"? I don't know. Probably both more and less than we think depending on our perspective. Relationships require parallel growth or they become stifling and that is a tall order in this society for a woman who wants to retain the experience of freedom. There are many layers of gender relating to unpack here as well as questions of what it means to grow, how we do this, etc. Most of this so unique to each person and relationship so as to be difficult to generalize.
⭐️ Great essay. I would have chosen the affectionate wing. I’m 30, traditional, Christian, and single because still no one has done the Christian thing. I am devastated because I never chose experience. All I ever wanted was the affectionate wing. And while I am highly educated (masters degree) and have studied abroad and lived in many American cities as well, I don’t think the independence was or is worth it at all. Maybe if I ever do find an affectionate wing, I’ll look back and think I grew in ways others didn’t through this time. I never had those empty, hedonistic experiences described so well in this essay that are both exhilarating and worthless. I have always had something higher to live for—God. And I think in the end, my faith will have served me well. Certainly, if I never get married, a part of me thinks I’ll be perversely grateful that I didn’t have all of the affairs because my married friends who DID have them say now that married sex is so much better than unmarried sex and that the men they gave themselves to before did not deserve them at all. I never want the feeling of wanting to take myself back because I’ve experienced that with a friend before and it’s a horrible feeling. All the same—vacillating between numbness and intense pain because of an absence of nearly all experience (both wholesome and hedonistic) is excruciating and I would not recommend it. I certainly hope someone does the Christian thing for me…sooner rather than later.
Important work, living our lives. I always thought of myself as living a story, not gathering experiences. Each relationship, each job, any place I moved, all another story. Absent from your essay is the protective wing I lacked: loving parents. If your assumption is that marriage and love is what experience gathering eliminates, I would have to disagree. You've imagined being able to recast your past in a very writerly way, as a writer does. If I had done this it would have been like that. But the protective wing, when it comes, is never certain. It might seem certain to those lucky enough to have flourished there, but just as many find experiences both unpleasant and pleasant in its shade. Motherhood, for example, at any age, is a far deeper and involving story than current literary fiction seems to think. Especially young motherhood, single or married. And it is certainly not a protective wing, but a fraught exposure!
Marrying young doesn’t seem to me to be solely a “Christian thing”, but often a romantic thing, a leap at a time when, like the post mentions, you are innocent, not bitter, wide-eyed and dreamy.
I think it’s fair to say that marrying young and having fulfilling life experiences are not mutually exclusive.
I was wondering about the binary between experiences OR a young relationship. This suggests either that experience is limited to casual sex or that being in a relationship restricts a broader sense of experience: travelling the world, meeting interesting people, or going skydiving on a Sunday. Is either of these really the truest representation ?
There’s lots more to the world than random sex; there’s more to sex than random sex: deep, connected, loving vulnerability.
One can travel the world with their partner, having a warm tent to return to and discuss the new perspectives gained. Perhaps having children limits these options somewhat, but it replaces one set of experience with the adventure of parenthood.
I say this to propose a happier middle-ground: one might have their proverbial wedding cake and also spend a life-time eating cake. Perhaps I’m missing something about your definition of experience, but why not experience things under the affectionate wing of another ? The wing itself *is* an enriching experience.
Well written but one point….there seems to be an implication that the women in question in this article would marry someone rich if they married earlier. Hot doctor wasn’t a doctor at that age. And the same shitty job that Elaine had would still be the same or a similar shitty job married with kids.
Marrying early wont allow escaping 21st century economics
This is a very interesting and thoughtful essay, although I think one views the question differently depending on whether one feels like an object or subject of one’s early adulthood. I think many women who marry later do so not because they “chose experience,” but rather because they struggled to find a partner. If you perceive your long single years as a choice, they feel differently than if you wished to marry early but couldn’t find a partner, or your husband died or left you, if no one “did the Christian thing.”
I generally do not think regret of this sort is useful; for most of the women you seem to have in mind, to wish to have married early would be to wish to be a different person entirely. You can’t sail the river of might have been: you cannot know what life you would have had if you’d made different choices. But you can know the life you would not have had, and it’s the one you have now. I will never wish my first marriage had survived, even though I would have been spared immense hurt, because if I were still married to my first husband, I would never have even met the man to whom I am married now. I would not have my children. I would never have seen so much of the world; my best friend would not be my best friend; I would never have had my beloved first dog, who died four months ago. I would not be myself, and I will never wish to be someone who I am not.
So many new choices and possibilities for young women since the 1970s, and so much ink and angst spent dissecting it all. What almost never occurs to anyone, perhaps because we dread aging so tend see the aged as a different, lesser species, is to ask women who've lived through it how it all turned out. Think "motherhood" and what comes to mind? Chubby babies and Christmas card family photos? Pumping breast milk at the office and arranging play dates? Doing piles of mud stained laundry and bringing crock pots of food to the team awards night? Endless variations but they usually involve the busy years of young family life. Years single women the same age may be lonely, collecting different experiences. But what happens next is important too. Do those children and husbands stick around and maintain meaningful connections throughout a woman's whole life? Or is she temporary support, a waystation for others' experiences and dreams? Which came first, women's liberation as a woman's choice or a modern individualism that permitted men to replace old wives with new, children to move far away and visit infrequently if at all and relegate the unsightly elderly to nursing homes? Among my women peers, now in their 50s and up, there's not much difference in daily life between those who had children and those who didn't. (This is less true of working class friends and colleagues who tend to be more involved with grandchildren and extended family, not always under the best circumstances but with what seems like more mutual loyalty.) There's a dramatic rise in family estrangement, so painful for mothers especially. At some level, girls and women know their whole lives that we will likely become our mothers. What does that role represents to us? Someone who is revered or at least appreciated and cared for or someone who is a burden and annoyance to be avoided? That view of elder motherhood should and does, if only subliminally, help inform our choices.
This
Thanks for this essay, successful because the thoughtfulness and nuance of the writing inspires a consideration of our own twenties.
My wife and I married in 1985 when we were 23 after meeting a year earlier. So we never had the experience of being single in our twenties. But neither of us ever had the sense of doors being shut.
It's been a grand adventure for the past forty years. Of course we've had our share of "life," in the form of issues and heartache and fights. And with three children, like all parents except liars, we've made our share of mistakes, some funny and some not.
I'm as excited about our life together now as I was forty years ago. I don't know if that makes us an exception or not.
Beautiful essay. Something that occurred to me as I was reading is how we make life needlessly complicated by asserting these strict binaries. What if Simon and Eileen just kept dating? What if they had nurtured a real, stable relationship, and then married when the time was right for them? It's easy to romanticize young marriage, but the stats are what they are. Folks who get married in their early twenties are at a significantly higher risk of divorce. Anyone who has come out on the other side and reached their late twenties and beyond knows why: the things we worry about, the anxieties and immaturities we possess, not to mention the financial instability, make for a powder keg. Something levels out as we get older. We realize that the silly things we used to worry about don't matter. Call me a romantic, but you can still have enriching, exciting experiences with a loving partner by your side. It doesn't have to be "either/or."
I think that using single=experience/marriage=stability as two poles for how to choose life is somewhat arbitrary. Stability, in many ways, underwrites the success of both modes of living. Being single with stability often means that moving to New York or backpacking around Europe becomes an Epcot adventure as long as there is a safety net to fall back on. If someone has landed a tony, artistic job, I’m guessing that this person has a safety net (upper middle class or wealthy parents.)
By the same token, getting married without any kind of safety net, for whatever combination of motives (love, survival, escape), can leave both members of the relationship shoulder deep in “experience”. The experience of struggling to find a place to live, pay rent, eviction if you can’t pay rent, trying to build stability when it isn’t given is, in most senses, more of an “experience” than say, going to Paris.
Agree! I’ve always wanted stable love, married twice, now 52 with two abusive marriages behind me and three grown or near-grown sons. I still crave a wing to be under … even though I’m tons stronger than most men I know. “Choosing” may not mean what you think it means, because you never know what you choose. I do know a loyal, stable, exclusive, sacred-bond-based relationship was/is my right path, even if we humans are so rarely up to the challenge.
With respect, many women are insecure, atomized, and unfulfilled not because they forewent young marriage, but because basically everyone not-affluent is feeling those things. Most of the structures of social life in the anglosphere are aimed at separating people: eliminating public spaces, eliminating safe and comfortable shared living spaces, eliminating opportunities and resources for spending casual time, eliminating the natural world, commoditizing and siloing hobbies, pathologizing non-productive behavior, and on and on. Marriage and nuclear family aren’t the ultimate source of security and social connection, they’re an inadequate consolation in an atomized dystopia. And they are only still encouraged because they satisfy the productivist necessity for reproduction of labor. (Wrote on this here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/08/seinfeld-and-friends-reflected-the-atomized-u-s-of-the-90s-and-today) Marriage and nuclear family are not fringe pursuits; a considerable majority of people end up in these structures because in a lot of places that's all that's left to achieve a feeling of social connection and security. People pining for meaning, safety, and security and thinking that it belongs only in the utopia of nuclear family because their parents and grandparents were married and also generally secure, are committing a false cause fallacy. They were secure because they grew up in the biggest middle-class expansion in history, which gave them time and financial security, and which is now in probably permanent retreat. Universal marriage won’t solve that, ask any historical peasant.
I fully agree! Community and connection is not only attainable through a nuclear family. It is funny how many people seem to “feel” the same problem (some variant of lack of meaning) but some revert to “we need to go back to nuclear families - that will solve all” while others pivot to more experiences, but somehow the real elephant in the room is not properly addressed.
Thank you for this article. It's put into words very accurately the "idolatry of experience" that I've gradually become aware of since my college years. It's very comforting to me that people are starting to independently wake up to this reality.
If I may make some observations from the Catholic tradition of Christianity, much of which is shared by other Christians...
St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, made "happiness" (ευδαιμονία) the centerpiece of his moral theology. This tradition of thought believes that the human person - and all lifeforms, in their own way - desires the Good by nature. To desire is to desire the Good: you literally cannot desire anything else. Happiness is the fulfillment of this desire. The question then becomes whether and how far this desire can be fulfilled.
Keeping on the worldly level, Aristotle basically saw this fulfillment of desire as the attainment of wisdom: to grasp truth about reality, including oneself. Because this wisdom is what enables living the good life. Happiness comes ultimately from living a good life. Further, with other Greek philosophers, the task of philosophy was to be able to die well, and to die well was to be wise and good by the end of your life. Not successful, not well known, not powerful, not wealthy, and not "experienced."
Now, a generous reading of the cult of experience is that, actually, people are trying to gain experience for the sake of what Aristotle and other Greeks believed was the point of life. However, the operative concept of experience lacks a workable concept of the Good. Without this, experiences cannot really be evaluated as beneficial or not, so there's no directionality (τέλος) that can put bounds on what people are pursuing. With the proper directionality, even bad experiences can be seen into growing in wisdom.
So what's it all for? If that question can't be sufficiently answered, we have a recipe for despair.
Now Aquinas, as a Christian, found Aristotle's framework pretty helpful, because he could say the Good = God. And Aristotle would agree with this, even though his concept of God would be very different. If the Good = God, then in some mysterious way, what everything and everyone is pursuing is in fact God. And not just that, but the happiness that is a sharing in God's own life because of a certain proportion of goodness.
This doesn't mean that there are not many legitimate happinesses, even very fulfilling ones, along the way, but fundamental to the gospel of Christ is that you are simply never going to find true happiness this side of the veil: you were made for more. And in fact, the pursuit of happiness separated from the ultimate happiness we were made for in God will actually lead to undermining our own good: to be satisfied with a lesser good is to thwart attainment of the Good. Hence, Jesus: "Seek first the kingdom of God, and all else will be granted to you." There is an ordering of pursuit that makes life worthwhile.
So, that's how I read all of this. If anyone else finds this helpful, great. 🙏
i think marilynne robinson once said something like, “Might we not all have been kinder and saner if we had said that discontent is our natural condition…”
As someone who chose art and independence over marriage and family, and who feels, at 39, incredibly fulfilled by that choice, I refuse to cede happiness to those who married young. And as someone who has been on the receiving end of much resentment from married mothers at work and in my social circle (jealous I could go back to school in my 30s, or travel, or simply seem fulfilled) I think this essay, while elegantly written, presents a false binary. Experience comes in many forms, as does happiness, and if we’re lucky, we get to work at them all our lives.
Beautiful essay. I admired the writing and how it engaged the topic while still doing justice to the novel. What I found really interesting is how it questions the liberal worldview while still using a somewhat classically liberal framework–the idea that everything is a choice, i.e. “I chose experience, but I could’ve chosen marriage and family. Did I choose wrong?” Never in my life did I think “having experiences” mattered and yet I was also very poor and lonely in my 20’s despite being quite religious at the time. Not seeing all of life as a choice, I usually blamed God or late capitalism. I would have to examine my life quite carefully to separate out the choices from the circumstances, and I would probably be wrong anyway. I’m reminded of a Dear Sugar column from many years ago about the “Ghost Ship”--the ship represents the lives we didn’t lead, “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” She also frames it as a choice, but acknowledges we’ll never know if that life would’ve been better, only that it was “important and beautiful and not ours.” I think if traditional views have anything going for them, it’s not to get some “better” life–although that could happen–but to have the inner resources to accept whatever does happen.
You expressed a lot of what I was feeling too.
This is an exquisite essay. Thank you.
I married at 22 under the guise of a christian worldview. It did not last. Neither did the next one. I've had my times of independence and my times of seeking love. It's an impossible question looking back because from the seat of 49 an affectionate wing would have done me a world of good and goddess do I desire it... but here's the rub: I could not withstand such a relationship because it ran counter to the beliefs encoded in me through a desperately traumatic childhood. I share this because I don't think we have the choice we think we do. I loved love but could not love. And I can only say that 26 years later.
How many partnerships begun young are this "affectionate wing"? I don't know. Probably both more and less than we think depending on our perspective. Relationships require parallel growth or they become stifling and that is a tall order in this society for a woman who wants to retain the experience of freedom. There are many layers of gender relating to unpack here as well as questions of what it means to grow, how we do this, etc. Most of this so unique to each person and relationship so as to be difficult to generalize.
⭐️ Great essay. I would have chosen the affectionate wing. I’m 30, traditional, Christian, and single because still no one has done the Christian thing. I am devastated because I never chose experience. All I ever wanted was the affectionate wing. And while I am highly educated (masters degree) and have studied abroad and lived in many American cities as well, I don’t think the independence was or is worth it at all. Maybe if I ever do find an affectionate wing, I’ll look back and think I grew in ways others didn’t through this time. I never had those empty, hedonistic experiences described so well in this essay that are both exhilarating and worthless. I have always had something higher to live for—God. And I think in the end, my faith will have served me well. Certainly, if I never get married, a part of me thinks I’ll be perversely grateful that I didn’t have all of the affairs because my married friends who DID have them say now that married sex is so much better than unmarried sex and that the men they gave themselves to before did not deserve them at all. I never want the feeling of wanting to take myself back because I’ve experienced that with a friend before and it’s a horrible feeling. All the same—vacillating between numbness and intense pain because of an absence of nearly all experience (both wholesome and hedonistic) is excruciating and I would not recommend it. I certainly hope someone does the Christian thing for me…sooner rather than later.
Yes. I relate to this so much.
Important work, living our lives. I always thought of myself as living a story, not gathering experiences. Each relationship, each job, any place I moved, all another story. Absent from your essay is the protective wing I lacked: loving parents. If your assumption is that marriage and love is what experience gathering eliminates, I would have to disagree. You've imagined being able to recast your past in a very writerly way, as a writer does. If I had done this it would have been like that. But the protective wing, when it comes, is never certain. It might seem certain to those lucky enough to have flourished there, but just as many find experiences both unpleasant and pleasant in its shade. Motherhood, for example, at any age, is a far deeper and involving story than current literary fiction seems to think. Especially young motherhood, single or married. And it is certainly not a protective wing, but a fraught exposure!
Marrying young doesn’t seem to me to be solely a “Christian thing”, but often a romantic thing, a leap at a time when, like the post mentions, you are innocent, not bitter, wide-eyed and dreamy.
I think it’s fair to say that marrying young and having fulfilling life experiences are not mutually exclusive.
Thank you, I enjoyed reading this.
I was wondering about the binary between experiences OR a young relationship. This suggests either that experience is limited to casual sex or that being in a relationship restricts a broader sense of experience: travelling the world, meeting interesting people, or going skydiving on a Sunday. Is either of these really the truest representation ?
There’s lots more to the world than random sex; there’s more to sex than random sex: deep, connected, loving vulnerability.
One can travel the world with their partner, having a warm tent to return to and discuss the new perspectives gained. Perhaps having children limits these options somewhat, but it replaces one set of experience with the adventure of parenthood.
I say this to propose a happier middle-ground: one might have their proverbial wedding cake and also spend a life-time eating cake. Perhaps I’m missing something about your definition of experience, but why not experience things under the affectionate wing of another ? The wing itself *is* an enriching experience.
Well written but one point….there seems to be an implication that the women in question in this article would marry someone rich if they married earlier. Hot doctor wasn’t a doctor at that age. And the same shitty job that Elaine had would still be the same or a similar shitty job married with kids.
Marrying early wont allow escaping 21st century economics
This is a very interesting and thoughtful essay, although I think one views the question differently depending on whether one feels like an object or subject of one’s early adulthood. I think many women who marry later do so not because they “chose experience,” but rather because they struggled to find a partner. If you perceive your long single years as a choice, they feel differently than if you wished to marry early but couldn’t find a partner, or your husband died or left you, if no one “did the Christian thing.”
I generally do not think regret of this sort is useful; for most of the women you seem to have in mind, to wish to have married early would be to wish to be a different person entirely. You can’t sail the river of might have been: you cannot know what life you would have had if you’d made different choices. But you can know the life you would not have had, and it’s the one you have now. I will never wish my first marriage had survived, even though I would have been spared immense hurt, because if I were still married to my first husband, I would never have even met the man to whom I am married now. I would not have my children. I would never have seen so much of the world; my best friend would not be my best friend; I would never have had my beloved first dog, who died four months ago. I would not be myself, and I will never wish to be someone who I am not.