Why Getting Married Young Makes Marriage That Much Harder

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People change; it's a basic fact of life. By the time you’re 40, you discover that you’ve evolved into a completely different person that when you were at the ripe age of 22. No doubt your habits, interests and priorities will be different. It comes as no surprise that many of people who marry young will often look back on the decision with some measure of regret. There might be things in life you didn't get to seize the opportunities of, like travelling and taking time to learn who you really are. It causes relationships to break down, and more people to get divorced by the time they are 30.

You can get married young and beat the odds, it just might be a more difficult task. You will have to work that much harder to handle relationship insecurities and life’s problems as a team. Here are the reasons why getting hitched at a young age makes marriage a bit more difficult.

You have less experience with relationships.

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Getting married is supposed to be the be-all-end-all of relationships. You do it once and you’re done. So when a couple gets married young, they may regret not testing the waters a bit more before settling on a partner. What was once a match made in heaven might become an example of incompatibility, because you haven’t fully grown, formed, or experienced enough to realize what you actually need out a partner. You may realize that the person you married doesn’t have the same values as you over time, for example. This leads couples to begin questioning “what if I had looked at other options.” A lack of knowledge of what else is out there and a lack of previous relationships you can compare to make marrying young difficult.

Not quiet mature enough to deal with life’s problems.

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While you might have been excited about life at the young age of 20, you also probably realized what it means to be out in the real world. Life throws a lot of twist and turns at you, and you have to accept that life simply isn’t fair. There will be hard days and how you handle them tells a lot about you. This is something that you learn to deal with as you grow and mature. When you get married young, you might not have the maturity to deal with life’s problems in an effective way. Instead small life problems cause huge fights and issues with your partner. Quickly, communication can break down and make life even more difficult. It’s important to do what you can to stay ahead of these issues so you can handle them in a healthy way.

You move through life too quickly.

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Marriage brings many changes: along with the ring and new last name, it ushers in a new, more responsible, phase of life. Some young couples regret jumping into this stage of life, because they didn't fully understand what came along with it. Unfortunately, there’s no jumping back, and you might have to accept that you went through life a little too fast. Marrying young takes away time you may have spent in your 20s travelling, dating different types of people, or learning who you really are as a person. Some people regret giving up that fun stage of their life, and that can lead to resentment towards the marriage. You might eventually see it as something that holds you back, rather than something you can grow with.

Merging lives together can be more difficult.

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When you get married, you’re combining two lives into one. Topics like money, for example, can get tricky because you are still learning how to manage your finances yourself. Maybe you're still figuring out how to earn it or save it, but either way you don’t yet have the experience to make it an easy transition. Your vision for your lives may change as you get older, and it may not be what it was when you dated. Getting married young means that you're still figuring out who you are, and you're doing that while committed to another person. Instead of being free to make the mistakes you need to make to learn the realities of life, the mistakes you make greatly affect the life of someone else.

You will lose friends, while getting unwanted attention from family.

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Marriage causes many changes for the couple, including their relationships with other people. Some friends you will have for life, but many times you will both lose friends after a marriage. The friendships fade away because your interests are different. This is OK, but can be hard for young couples to accept. In turn, you might feel that your family and in-laws are giving you too much attention and not enough space. When you fight with your partner at a younger age, you are more likely to turn to your parent for advice. This can cause privacy issues in your marriage when a parent or in-law gets too involved in your personal business. The boundaries are harder to define when you are young.