Marriage Under 20… Good or Bad?

My husband and I married in June of 2009. I was 19, and he was 22. In the months leading up to the wedding, and for a while afterwards, people asked me why. How could I make the decision to marry someone while I was still so young, while I still had so much to live for?

My answer to them was, it’s not as though marrying ends your life. My husband is my best friend, the one and only person I want to stand next to me as life throws it’s many tests and difficulties our way. My marriage is the most important thing in my life. Of course, people then ask me about my goals. How can I achieve them while I am married? The answer is quite simple. My husband is my biggest fan. He wants me to achieve my goals even more than I want to, and having him to share my successes with makes my life that much more meaningful, and my successes so much more important and amazing.

But, there is a point to my story here. So many people marry young because they say that they can’t imagine their life without that person, or because if they didn’t have that person in their life they would die. I can imagine my life without my husband. I know exactly what it would be like, because I lived without him for the first part of my life. I just don’t want to ever have to live without him again, and I want him to be my partner in every thing I do in life. And, I know that if something happened to my husband, I would not die. But I would be completely heartbroken. At the same time, I would feel blessed for the time I got to share with him, and he would remain an important part of my life.

I think that most people marry while they are so young because they want to feel secure. They want to know that they are not alone in life, and they have someone to lean on when times are hard. They marry because of the things they don’t want to feel, rather than the things that they do feel when they are with their partner. And those who do marry because of the way their partner makes them feel, don’t take the faults of their partner in to consideration when they make the decision. Of course, there are many other potential pitfalls that young people face in their quest to have a successful relationship, but it seems as though the primary issue is, people blind themselves to the truth.

So, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with marriage under 20. But, when making the decision to marry young, people need to be aware of many, many things. They need to be completely honest with themselves, and their partners. And, perhaps most important of all, they need to remember that having a child is not a good reason to get married. Nor is pressure from parents, or friends, or even their partner. The success of a relationship depends on the health of each individual person, mentally, psychologically, and even physically.