That is the topic of the paper that I am currently in the middle of writing. Don't worry, I'm not going to make you read it. What I might make you read is something that I found while I was finding the folder containing said paper. This is something that I wrote on my birthday last year. I think it is kind of interesting.
August 16, 2009, 11:10 pm
I have less than an hour left until my 23rd birthday. Wow. But I don’t really want to talk about my birthday in too much detail-mostly because I feel like I’m getting really old. Especially since I am heading back out to BYU this week and I am worried that I will feel REALLY old when I get there. But perhaps I will be surprised by the number of 23 year-old single female BYU students who are just like me. I guess I’m not really too worried about it. But it is kind of fun to joke about. I also don’t exactly look 23-not unless you know-so that is also a big plus. But I wanted to write a little today about a random thought I had when pondering on my upcoming birthday a few days ago. I was thinking about aging and why being 23 would scare me. One of the main reasons is that I don’t want to be too old to get married at BYU. I know 23 is not old in the “real world”. But I go to BYU and that is definitely not the real world. Many girls at BYU marry before they are 20, let alone reach 23 without a ring on their fingers. Anyhow, as I was thinking about why I might be “too old to get married” I had an epiphany: I believe, or believed as the case may be, that getting married will somehow stop or slow my aging process. I have one response to this thought: HAHAHAHAHA. Not likely. However I wonder how many other people have had this same idea-being married will slow your internal clock. Somewhere deep down we know it isn’t true and yet it is hard to completely expel the thought that marital vows somehow tamper with time. What I think now is that aging doesn’t matter as much once you marry because, to use a food analogy here, you were purchased before your expiration date. This entire topic gets me in a mood to ponder and think about these things, like if everyone has the same expiration date and and what causes us to expire. I think I would like to explore these thoughts. First, I believe that we all have different expiration dates on our marriage eligibility and some individuals may never expire at all and may continue to be perfectly eligible for marriage at 29, 49, or even 89. For the majority of people though I think the age is somewhere between 35-43 for a first marriage. I don’t even want to touch the idea of second or third marriages today. There are many more factors involved than in first marriages. Now I don’t think that is your prime age to be married by any stretch of the imagination, rather the cutoff date. Kind of like the sell by date and the last possible use date or something to continue our food analogy. In my opinion the best time to form a marriage relationship is between the ages of 21 and 30. I give due credit to those who marry outside of this range and make it work and take zero blame for those who marry within the range and get divorced. I am not an expert yet and therefore this is merely for my own entertainment and pontification and is not the product of research. Now, here are my own personal reasonings behind my two age groups and why we tend to “expire” as eligible marriage partners. As humans we go through many developmental stages. We are constantly learning, growing, acting, reacting, and being acted upon. Between the ages of 21 and 26 we are in what I like to call “emerging adulthood” and we are learning what it really means to be an adult. We graduate from college or finish other educational pursuits and many enter the workforce. We move out and stay out of our parents’ home and create one of our own. We have learned much about the world but are still not quite set in our ways. There is still a flexibility about us that lends itself to entering a partnership that, in its most glorious state, will produce complete unity. That is the kind of marriage I want-a unified one. There will be compromise. My way is not always right and I know that. But we are not stiff and rigid in our beliefs and tend to be forming our most important opinions during this stage in life. When marriages take place during this stage, I believe that both partners continue to develop into adulthood both individually but also collectively. The important developmental challenges or whatever are tackled as a team and these common goals give a couple unity in their development. When someone goes through the emerging adulthood phase alone, they can still come out a productive, capable adult. But they are not able to capitalize on the collective development that will create the most harmony and unity in their marriage. Their opinions and values are a little more rigid and permanent. Therefore, when two people marry in their 30s, although the relationship can be happy and healthy, I believe there will be more challenges in the day-to-day living than in a marriage formed in the emerging adulthood phase. To illustrate my point I am going to create a couple. (Mostly because I have no research to back any of this up…hehehe.) Brian is 24 and Kate is 22. Brian has just entered medical school and Kate is finishing up her last semester of undergraduate work. They get married and have lots of debt and very little cash. Will this cause stress in their marriage? Definitely. But they are a team and will therefore be working towards paying off their collective debt. Neither one of them has any experience paying off debt alone and so they learn this skill together. When they buy their first house a few years down the road, they are able to be united as they decide how large of a mortgage they can pay because they have worked together to begin paying back the student loans. There’s the theory. Here’s an older couple (again completely made up). James and Ashley are both 32 and are recently married. James has an MBA and is working his way up the corporate ladder. Ashley is a district attorney. They have each made significant payments on their student loans and Ashley has a mortgage on her condo. Each of them has already learned their own way of handling the finances, including mortgage payments and other debt reduction. As they try to do it together, there is frustration as they must defend their methods of money management and try to align their financial affairs. They have each learned independently the adult skill of money management. There is no real need for them to learn this collectively and therefore it is possible that there will be disagreements on how to run their household finances. This same principle I believe can be applied to other areas of family life and is not just limited to finance. Nutrition, travel, visiting family, freetime activities, etc. are other examples of areas where this may be apparent. I also believe I am advocating that marriage partners are close in age, say within 5 years of each other. I believe this would be very interesting to research for real.
In the present day...I still this might be interesting to research. Or just to think about.
Well, now I really need to be off writing my paper. I have a pretty fascinating topic, it's just formulating my thoughts properly that is elusive. Maybe it's all the pressure of writing a good paper to somehow salvage my grade in this class.
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