I would let my children marry young

Plus: an unconstitutional executive order, GOP socialists, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post. As a reminder, I’m writing a new book this fall. Please read about it, and:

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I would let my children marry young

We got married young. Not wildly young, per the numbers at the time—I had just turned 24, and the median age of first marriage for women in 2012 was about 26. But my husband was freshly 23, markedly lower than the then-median of 28 for men, and by today’s standards, we were infants. The median age for women now is nearly 29, and for men it’s north of 30.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think this ever-upward drift¹ is a mistake, and a mistake partially attributable to one misconception and one real lack. Earlier this week, I happened upon an example of the misconception here on Substack, in a recent post from exvangelical writer Jen Hatmaker:

If you put my young adult kids in five separate rooms and asked them individually what emphatic instruction I badgered them with growing up, they’d all give the same answer:

“If you come home at nineteen and tell me you are engaged, I will run you over with my car.”

That is not a dramatized version; that is verbatim. Thus saith the 1993 nineteen-year-old bride. My desire to protect their young adulthoods for young experiences and young fun and young living has always been so intense. Perhaps I am glamorizing young adulthood because I handed mine over to marriage and motherhood. I birthed three babies by age twenty-seven after I’d already been married eight years. I had no 20’s. I had a mortgage and a Suburban.

Hatmaker has a new memoir about to drop on the end of her marriage to a pastor whom, she writes, she caught in infidelity when he sent a voice message to the other woman from the marital bed in the middle of the night. This is an appalling story, and I want to give all due allowance for how an experience like that would color one’s view of early marriage.

And yet, I do think there’s a misconception here, and one hardly unique to Hatmaker. It’s the idea that early marriage can’t be fun, the notion that you won’t have a young adulthood full of young experiences if you’re already hitched. Of course, you won’t have the particular experience of having sex with multiple people to whom you are not married. But all the rest of it—travel, restaurants, short-term jobs, renting an apartment in the cool part of town, driving a beater or a bike or a convertible instead of a minivan, constantly hanging out with friends, going to parties and patios, festivals and bars—will be just as available with a ring on your finger.

I speak from personal experience when I say you can do all those things while married.² You should do those things while married. The only difference is you get to do them with your spouse.

You get to visit new places together. You get to go to college and grad school together. You get to launch and figure out your careers together—and by the way, there’s literally nothing more helpful for getting your start as a working writer (and many other more precarious careers as well) than having a spouse with an insurance job.

The answer is I have a nanny

So again, with all recognition for varied experiences and the acknowledgement that 23/24 is not the same as 19: Getting married early is not constraining. It’s not the death knell of fun. It is—or at least can be—chill. It is—or at least can be—mutually beneficial. It even is—or at least can be—a leg up in your career, not a setback.

The sticking point, of course, is in that caveat: can be. And here we come to the real lack: All things being equal, early marriage may go badly if it plunges young people into situations they are not resourced to handle.

I phrase that vaguely on purpose because I have a couple scenarios in mind. One is about internal resources: Some 19-year-olds are ready for marriage, but some are not. They are not mature enough, even if they think they are. I’m nowhere near parenting a 19-year-old, but my encounters with the species in adulthood confirm my contemporary impression that they vary widely. There’s only so much to be done about that, especially by third parties.

The other scenario I have in mind, though, is about more external resources: Can the couple support themselves? If not—if, for instance, one or both are still in college—are their families willing and able to chip in until they can? If they have a baby,³ would they be able to figure out childcare? Would their friends or families help? Do they have a local church to step in with casseroles and hand-me-downs and discounted rent and some light nepotism in a tough job market?

These things will make an enormous difference in whether an early marriage can succeed, and here, something often can be done. The lack can be filled by community.

My small group from church is talking about loosely coordinating parenting rules for when our kids get older. A lot of it is tech-focused: When your 13-year-old is endlessly whining about getting a smartphone, it would be clutch to be able to come back with, I dunno what you want me to do here. What I’ve decided is just totally normal. Look at our friends. None of their kids have phones either!

The group chat is the problem

We’re also talking about guidelines for dating and marriage. I made a poll to get a sense of where different families are landing on this stuff—if our ideas are converging—and one of the questions was about what age or stage should be the baseline condition for endorsing an engagement. There’s some mild difference of opinion, but the most common answer is ability to self-support: Finish school (whether that’s high school, trade school, or undergrad), get a job that pays some kind of rent, and then have at it.

So yeah, I’d let my kids get married young.⁴ At 19? I dunno. It’d depend on the kid. It’d depend on the prospective spouse. It’d depend on the circumstances. But very possibly. At 24, 23, even 22? Absolutely. Why wait? You’re not as ready as you’ll ever be, but you’re as ready as you need to be. Get married already and have young fun.

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Odds & ends

• Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, by

  Ross Douthat

• Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion, by Samuel L. Perry

• After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity, by David P. Gushee

• This article about Gloo, the “Christian AI” company whose staff I interviewed for CT, by Alex Ashley for MIT Technology Review. Please note the correction notice at the top. You can compare the original version vs. the current version (as of this writing; sounds like more updates may be coming) using these archive links. Yet even with those edits and the circumspection they should prompt, the certain stuff alone—like on-the-record quotes straight from Gloo—makes this a very troubling report. Take this line from a pastor who ranks high in a denomination that has adopted Gloo’s tech on a large scale: “Until now, we’ve lacked the insight to understand how church culture, people, and congregations are truly doing.” This is either marketing BS or the accidental revelation of a remarkable absence of pastoral due diligence. Or this one, from an emailed Gloo statement: “The church is ‘a highly fragmented market that is one of the largest yet to fully adopt digital technology.’” Is that what the church is?

• “All I really need to know I learned from evangelicalism,” by

  Matthew J. Milliner
  for First Things

As a teenage evangelical convert, I remember being moved by a downright maudlin sermon claiming that had I been the only person on earth, Jesus would have died just for me. Over time, such rhetoric lost its attraction—or so I thought. I launched into the study of exotic medieval mysticism for something different, where I encountered this insight from Julian of Norwich: “For I am certain that if there had been no one but I to be saved, God would have done everything which he has done for me.”

• “A word to my students,” by Alan Jacobs for his blog

I’ll start to answer that by turning it around: If I forbade chatbot use, would my stated policy have any effect whatsoever on your actions? Pause and think about it for a moment: Would it?

For some of you the answer will be: No. And to you I say: Thanks for the candor.

Others among you will reply: Yes. And probably you mean it. But will your compliance survive a challenge? When you’re sitting around with friends and every single one of them except you is using a chatbot to get work done, will you be able to resist the temptation to join them? When they copy and paste and then head merrily out for tacos, will you stay in your room and grind? Maybe you will, once, or twice, or even three times, but … eventually…. I mean, come on: We all know how this story ends.

• “A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in,” by Kashmir Hill for The New York Times

• “Trump’s executive order prohibiting flag burning is unconstitutional,” by Robby Soave for Reason

• “The cultural contradictions of conservatism,” by

  Aaron M. Renn
  for Compact

• “How our weekly dinners are going,” by

  Amanda Litman

Every Saturday around 2:00 p.m., as the kids are finally napping, my husband is stressed about cooking everything in time, and I’m sweeping dog food off the floor for the umpteenth time, we have basically the same conversation:

Should we just cancel? Should this be the last one? Should we call it? Is this stupid?

And then every Saturday night after our guests leave and the kids are in bed, even with a counter full of dirty dishes and a lightly messy home to straighten up, we say to ourselves:

That was so lovely. What a nice night. Let’s do it again next week.

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1. I mean this at the grand scale, of course. I have seen unwillingly delayed and unhappily lost commitment up close and am not commenting on anyone’s particular circumstances.

2. Ok, I didn’t personally go to festivals while married, because I am pretty square, but I know people who did.

3. Though I do think you can have fun as a parent, I am less of a booster of early childbearing. Not against it, and I recognize the biological risks in delay. But, as I recently explained on X, I have no regrets about waiting until 31 to have kids.

4. “let”—“Hodel likes him. Hodel loves him. So what can we do?”