How Old were you when you first got married? Any regrets?

[Bob_Crowley]

I know this question has been asked before, but as I’ve noticed, on one extreme, teenagers wondering if marriage isn’t their vocation because they haven’t had any success on the dating scene, and on another, people stating “no one should be married in their twenties”.

So I’d like to ask not just about age, but if you think you were the right age. Hence why my specification of when you FIRST got married, as I know many posters here did have the first marriage end in divorce and/or annulment.

I’ll give my marital history, although I’m not sure if it’s a good idea or not. Maybe somebody might gain something from it.

I think I was 26 when I first got married. But it was a disaster. I don’t blame my ex-wife, and if anything she suffered more than I did. My father had destroyed my confidence, and so I married someone quite unsuited, since I didn’t have the confidence to meet women who would have been more realistically suited.

I was also an atheist at the time. Oh, it started innocently enough, but once sex came into it, and a lack of common interests, the relationship was doomed.

I became a Christian as i was going through the resulting divorce, was celibate for some years, and then met my current wife through a Christian singles group. At the time we were both Protestant, but I’ve since become Catholic. This has caused a bit of tension, since we now go to different churches, but generally we’ve worked around it.

What have I learned?

1. People make mistakes, and they can be very costly, sometimes life long.
2. Sex may be, or should be, part of any marriage. But you can’t build a relationship on sex.
3. If you’re a Christian, marry a Christian. And if you’re Catholic, I strongly suggest you marry a Catholic.
4. Be very careful of going into a relationship just because you’re lonely. If you’re lonely, get involved in other activites, help others, join clubs, and find other ways to be around people. But don’t go rushing into a relationship.
5. With my voluntary work with Vinnies, all too often I see single women shacking up with boyfriends, who do nothing to help financially, often leaving them with children they don’t support (I think God really punishes men who abandon their children when they die themselves), and the women just go on struggling all their lives.

But then some women just seem to have to have a man around. I’m afraid I don’t understand that part of their makeup, but then I’ve always been completely immune to the phenomenon of screaming fans as well. I just don’t have a clue. My old pastor was a bit more cynical - his attitude was “If a man says he understands how women think, he’s either a knave or a fool”, or something like that.

1. Make sure you’re compatible. This is the problem with sex. it can put a rosy glow over everything in the early stages, and the warning signs of future incompatibility are blurred by an erotic haze.
2. Finance is important, and both parties are responsible. Financial pressures can come suddenly and unpredictably - the express trains of heaven and hell don’t give much warning most of the time.
3. You don’t know what life’s going to throw at you. So be prepared for struggles at times.

That’s why take an oath - “For richer or poorer, for better or worse…” That’s exactly what it means.

 

[Xantippe]

One other thing you can do is put some time into reading about marriage / relationships.

That is one of my goals for this year.

Not because we are having any kind of problem, but because I don’t want to take our marriage for granted, and because I believe in continuous improvement.

A Christian couple I follow on social media, who I greatly admire, take a course at their local church on marriage.

That is a good idea too.

It is amazing how little study most of us do in one of the most critical areas of our life – our marriage.

Yes!

 

[Musician]

I was twenty, my husband 12 years older than I. No regrets 29 years later. I just hope for as many years as possible with my sweetheart.

 

[Dulcie]

I will be 28 when I get married, and DH 38. DH was, I think, about 26 when he got married for the first time, and his ex-wife a year younger.

I don’t think there is a perfect age. I wish I had been ready to marry earlier, but I don’t think I was. But other people clearly often are.

 

[bdjohnbg]

I was 18, and yes, I have regrets.

I barely knew him, and we married because I was pregnant. I knew that wasn’t a good reason, but I already had a child by someone else and believed that being married had to be so much easier than being a single parent. I was very wrong.

After four nightmarish years, we divorced, though there were years of custody and child support battles that followed. The only good things that came from that marriage were the lessons I learned.

 

[Kelfa28]

Both of us were 28. We started dating when we were 25.
We were engaged for about 8 months and our engagement was crazy. It was the biggest whirlwind of my life.
I was pregnant, we had started RCIA and also started house shopping.
I had our baby in at the end of March, she was baptized and my husband and I were accepted into the Church about a week later, we closed on our house about 2 weeks after that, we got married an additional two weeks after that and moved into our new home days later. All while working full time and juggling school.
No regrets what-so-ever. It was worth every stressful day.

Believe me, our wedding was quite the party.