Mitt Romney's case for getting married young

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Romney gave a great speech at Southern Virginia University making the case for marrying young and having a “quiver full of kids”.

deseretnews.com/article/765628615/Mitt-Romneys-case-for-getting-married-young.html

youtube.com/watch?v=bcnTYCZRJ9I

I am especially interested in one particular element of the speech:
Romney articulates the so-called “cornerstone” theory of marriage: that marriage is an institution worth building life on, not something to enter into once you’re already established in life.
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And, further, that marriage and raising a family molds the partners in beneficial ways.

This is not a new idea, I’m all but certain I’ve heard it in a Catholic context somewhere. It has certianly been my experience and I’d like to encourage my own children this way. But I have been unable to find any Catholic source for it and I am hesistant to rely on Joseph Smith for marriage advice.

Anyone?
 
I really think that marriage has to be on God’s time and that we shouldn’t try to assign a preferred age to getting married. As much as I would love to be married right now, as a man in my mid-20’s, I honestly think it would be a disaster as I am a new-convert who previously lived a sexually-immoral life and am still struggling to correct many years worth of wrongly-ordered sexual desires. I don’t believe a person should get married before being comfortably in control of one’s own sexual desires (since marriage ultimately will not satisfy these desires and this can lead to porn and adultery and families can be destroyed). I believe the correct age to marry is when a person can say that he/she is marrying first and foremost to do the Will of Almighty God and that any personal sexual desires are a strictly secondary (or even lower) priority.

That said, I agree with Romney that when somebody is ready for marriage they shouldn’t put it off for financial reasons. All that matters is that God’s Will is being done (He will take care of the money part). When His Will is being done, raising 10 kids off of one salary becomes completely possible (and I know real-life cases to back this up!)
 
One is hardly relying upon Romney or Joseph Smith by rejecting the extremely recent idea that one needs to be successfully established in career before getting married. Until modern marketing was invented, people had a much less materialistic view of the world and, thus, married young.

View it as rejecting Madison Avenue values. One need not be a Mormon to do that, eh? 😉
 
This is interesting. I am put to mind of the fact that the human body is actually giving us the same message. Women are at their most fertile in their late teens and early twenties. By age 30, fertility has dwindled substantially, and it drops sharply from there. Problem pregnancies go up from there.

I don’t know about Church doctrine on the matter, but I do recall that the Jesuits who instituted the Guarani states in South America encouraged early marriage among the natives. Likely that was to discourage concupiscence at least to a degree, but there might have been other objectives as well.

When my wife and I married, I was 24 and she was 22. Not so very young for marriage then, but getting more so all the time. We started having children a little more than a year later, then in rapid succession. Undoubtedly we paid career and long term financial prices for that, but I can’t really complain. Interestingly, we now have a substantial number of young grandchildren and (since older people have most of the assets in this society) really do enjoy spending it on their needs. We intend to die broke, and probably will. One has to wonder whether that spirit, whatever one might say about it, is a habit of life gained early on through early marriage and child rearing.

I don’t know, but I do wonder about it. Personally, I think Romney’s right.
 
MidnightSun12 said:
I really think that marriage has to be on God’s time and that we shouldn’t try to assign a preferred age to getting married. As much as I would love to be married right now, as a man in my mid-20’s, I honestly think it would be a disaster as I am a new-convert who previously lived a sexually-immoral life and am still struggling to correct many years worth of wrongly-ordered sexual desires. I don’t believe a person should get married before being comfortably in control of one’s own sexual desires (since marriage ultimately will not satisfy these desires and this can lead to porn and adultery and families can be destroyed). I believe the correct age to marry is when a person can say that he/she is marrying first and foremost to do the Will of Almighty God and that any personal sexual desires are a strictly secondary (or even lower) priority.

That said, I agree with Romney that when somebody is ready for marriage they shouldn’t put it off for financial reasons. All that matters is that God’s Will is being done (He will take care of the money part). When His Will is being done, raising 10 kids off of one salary becomes completely possible (and I know real-life cases to back this up!)
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Some famous person or other said of sex that: “Marriage combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.” I suggest that marriage itself corrects wrongly-ordered sexual desires for the most part, since sexual desires are, in fact, created by God to be exercised in marriage. Temptation to sin, however, is always with us, married or not.

I agree with most of what you said, but you might want to think this one part out again.
 
The key question, I suppose, is when is one ready for marriage? What are the prerequisites and what does the Church have to say on the subject? I didn’t expect it to be so hard to find anything but I have yet to succeed.

The earliest would be, I suppose, after puberty. That is a biological prerequisite and we can imagine early hunter-gatherers starting at that point and, indeed, until relatively recently, it was normal for people to marry in their mid to late teens and it’s still the case in agrarian societies. And recall also that until relatively recently that arranged or matched marriages were the norm.

One of the drivers of later marriage in mondern society is college. In the previous generations is was normal to find a mate in college and marry sometime after graduation, it not before. But now that is being pushed back even further by the pursuit of career.

The tendency today for many is to pursue a solitary mastery of self and then to add marriage to it (assuming that marriage is even part of the plan) when one is finally “ready.” And then begins the search for one’s soul mate.

What Romney points out, something I have heard somewhere before but I cannot remember the source, is that marriage shapes us as life itself does. Indeed, for all the psychobabble about life shaping experiences, it’s hard to find anything that is not more influential than marriage.

The Catholic sources that I have found have been pretty passive on the question. Mastubation is wrong, fornication is wrong, divorce is wrong. But single living? Meh.
 
Here is Cardinal Dolan saying something remarkaby similar:
Dolan announced that the most joyful event of the past few months for him was not his first papal conclave but the baptism of his newest grandnephew. He said that he was inspired by “the profound change” he saw in the baby’s mother and father. “Their whole identity was transformed with the arrival of Charlie, their first born!” In place of the “rather diverse and self-referential” interests that used to occupy them, Charlie now dominates “their sleep schedule, their plans, their budget, their conversation, their calendar, their future, their dreams.”
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“The human project,” Dolan proposed, “is all about babies! A man and woman are made for babies!”
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And culture itself, he said, is “simply humanity’s best effort to protect the baby, the mother, the father.” The purpose of culture, he said, is “to embrace, nurture, protect the baby, the mom, the dad, and to see that this precious infant has the embrace of a community to grow ‘in age and wisdom’ until — guess what? — that baby is an adult, can tenderly and faithfully love a spouse, then have his/her own baby, and the sacred cycle begins again.”
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He added: “Can we not even claim that culture is our attempt to ‘extend the womb,’ as babies and children are welcomed, protected, cherished, formed and educated with our highest values, so that they eventually then have their own babies?”
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nationalreview.com/article/347435/baby-you’re-greatest
 
He would of made a much better president than Obama.

Marrying young is the ideal but not everybody is blessed to find their wife or husband young.
 
_Abyssinia said:
He would of made a much better president than Obama.

Marrying young is the ideal but not everybody is blessed to find their wife or husband young.
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Oh YEAH, that’s the guy! I remember!!

embarrassing. . . . 😊
 
I recall reading an article about a study indicating that later marriage is associated with more divorce. Although this is somewhat counterintuitive, the conclusion was that when people married young, often after very few or perhaps only one serious romantic relatonship, they were more able to adapt to the changes and also less likely to consider divorce because they did not have experience of lengthy romantic relationships the didn’t result in marriage. The older brides and grooms become of a mind that if something doesn’t work out, there’s other fish in the sea. Further they tend to become more entrenched in their wants and their ways and less likely to work together for a shared life.

I really thought about this and it does make sense. I realize you don’t want to encourage teen marriage but young marriage where the woman is in her prime reproductive years makes a family more likely than someone who establishes in a career and starts trying to get pregnant at 35…the very thing that happened to many of my career oriented friends.

Lisa
 
Tagg Romney, Mitt and Ann Romney’s oldest son, announced the birth of twin boys Friday — born through a surrogate.
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And if you’re rich enough like the Romney’s you can hire a surrogate women to bear your children for your future planet. What should be stressed now is what marriage is supposed to be rather than encouraging people to get married young and potentially without proper formation.

I wonder if Romney supports paying migrant farmers a fair salary to provide for this family, I doubt it.
 
Tony_Micelli said:
And if you’re rich enough like the Romney’s you can hire a surrogate women to bear your children for your future planet. What should be stressed now is what marriage is supposed to be rather than encouraging people to get married young and potentially without proper formation.

I wonder if Romney supports paying migrant farmers a fair salary to provide for this family, I doubt it.
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This. The key should be whether they can enter this particular state in life and perform it well at that time, not what their age is at marriage.
 
Lots of opinions have been offered but I have yet to see anyone citing Church teaching on this matter. Perhaps that is a negative confirmation of an absence of teaching. (I orginally posted this in Moral Theology because I was looking for information on Church teaching. Someone moved it to news for whatever reason.)

A number of people offered the opinion that a couple should only enter into marriage when they are ready which is really like saying they should only enter into marriages that will be successful. It may seem like good advice but it’s really pretty useless and, in the modern context, actually misleading.

As I noted earlier, people used to get married pretty much as soon as they were biologically ready to bear children. That’s what “ready for marriage” meant. Nowadays, “ready for marriage” tends to mean financially stable which means waiting into the 30s or 40s or never. That’s the “capstone” theory of marriage.

And for all this waiting are we seeing more stable marriages? Nope. As LisaA correctly points out, waiting to marry is correlated with marriage failure. If marrying young were correlated with marital problems then we’d say that people are getting married too young. But as waiting to marry is correlated with marital problems, problems with fertility, and moral problems like fornication, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that marrying younger is better?

Finally consider this: when should a child choose his parents? Now, as you know, most people just accept their biological parents as their parents. But you’ll agree, I hope, that a child should really wait until he’s ready to choose his parents. The problem, of course, that parenting is perhaps the most critical part of becoming ready for anything. So we recognize the absurdity of waiting until we’re ready to choose our parents. And so it is with marriage, if not the same extreme.

Nobody is ready for life. But you are stuck with it just the same.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
Lots of opinions have been offered but I have yet to see anyone citing Church teaching on this matter. Perhaps that is a negative confirmation of an absence of teaching. (I orginally posted this in Moral Theology because I was looking for information on Church teaching. Someone moved it to news for whatever reason.)

A number of people offered the opinion that a couple should only enter into marriage when they are ready which is really like saying they should only enter into marriages that will be successful. It may seem like good advice but it’s really pretty useless and, in the modern context, actually misleading.

As I noted earlier, people used to get married pretty much as soon as they were biologically ready to bear children. That’s what “ready for marriage” meant. Nowadays, “ready for marriage” tends to mean financially stable which means waiting into the 30s or 40s or never. That’s the “capstone” theory of marriage.

And for all this waiting are we seeing more stable marriages? Nope. As LisaA correctly points out, waiting to marry is correlated with marriage failure. If marrying young were correlated with marital problems then we’d say that people are getting married too young. But as waiting to marry is correlated with marital problems, problems with fertility, and moral problems like fornication, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that marrying younger is better?

Finally consider this: when should a child choose his parents? Now, as you know, most people just accept their biological parents as their parents. But you’ll agree, I hope, that a child should really wait until he’s ready to choose his parents. The problem, of course, that parenting is perhaps the most critical part of becoming ready for anything. So we recognize the absurdity of waiting until we’re ready to choose our parents. And so it is with marriage, if not the same extreme.

Nobody is ready for life. But you are stuck with it just the same.
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Good points and note the results of late marriage are fertility problems that drive people to great extremes (surrogacy with the attendant killing of those conceived babies that are not implanted, terrible medical complications of the hormones used, etc) and also quite honestly, old parents who may not have the energy or adaptability to raising children. Further when the greatest financial demand occur, the older parent is of retirement age.

It’s funny when I got married (mid twenties waited to be out of college) the minister asked if we planned to have kids. We said “when we are ready.” He said “Then you’ll never have them because no one is ever ready.” He was right. (pre Catholic days)

Lisa
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
Here is a a couple great articles from Mark Regnerus (Evangelical):

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/24/AR2009042402122.html

christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/august/16.22.html

Would a Catholic ever write something like that? If not, why not?
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I wonder! Seems like this is totally within Catholic teaching, being open to life, family as the basic structure of society, etc.

The WaPo piece is particularly insightful. Reading it I heard my parents’ voices…don’t be dependent, be sure you can support yourself, children are very expensive and a lot of work, don’t have them until you are financially and emotionally ready…

I think the scare mongering about “young” marriage without noting that it’s TEEN marriage that is most unstable and probably a coerced marriage due to a baby on the way (do people still do this?) is probably ill advised. But 20 somethings are a different cohert and marriage then is biologically advantageous as well as being at a time when the husband and wife are more adaptable to married life than if they’d been on their own for several years after college.

Good reading, thank you for sharing these!
Lisa
 
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