Kevin Barney of By Common Consent has a post about what he calls the “Mormon Early Marriage Culture.” As is often the case with such topics, the post itself is brief but the comment thread is not. Barney talks about how he was an “odd duck” in law school because he already had a wife and child. I was married before I started law school, which also put me in the minority. But it was not an especially small minority; there were a fair number of students who had gotten married after undergrad. Some of those married students even had children while they were in school. Additionally, quite a few of my classmates were married during or immediately after graduation from law school. So perhaps young married Mormons aren’t as significant a group of outliers Barney takes them to be.
I admit that my law school classmates may not have been the most representative sample. I went to school in the South, where even the law students are somewhat more likely than their East Coast or West Coast counterparts to be religious. Or perhaps, since the legal profession is a relatively traditional profession, lawyers and future lawyers are more inclined to follow traditional social orders. It would take another study to figure that out.
A couple years ago the U.S. Census Bureau released some data indicating that, for the first time in American history, the majority of adults were unmarried. And according to the graph below (from seattlepi.com) the median age of marriage has risen to 27.1 years for men and 25.3 years for women. I don’t know what the median age is for Mormon men and women in America, but I’m guessing it’s a couple years younger.
A few of the comments on Barney’s BCC post make some good observations. One law student commenter noted that many of his fellow law students were in long-term relationships, even though they weren’t married. This matches with my experience as well: many of my classmates lived with a long-term boyfriend, girlfriend, or fiancée, often owning property together. A generation or two ago they would have been married, but under current norms they put it off or never ultimately marry.
In a somewhat different vein, commenter John Mansfield noted that the age of first marriage for women had been creeping up after 1960, but that the average age of first marriage for men stayed steady until it shot up in 1973. He opined that this was largely due to Roe v. Wade, and that the continued lower age of first marriage for Mormons may be due to the fact that they are somewhat unaffected by the availability of abortions.
I admit that my law school classmates may not have been the most representative sample. I went to school in the South, where even the law students are somewhat more likely than their East Coast or West Coast counterparts to be religious. Or perhaps, since the legal profession is a relatively traditional profession, lawyers and future lawyers are more inclined to follow traditional social orders. It would take another study to figure that out.
A couple years ago the U.S. Census Bureau released some data indicating that, for the first time in American history, the majority of adults were unmarried. And according to the graph below (from seattlepi.com) the median age of marriage has risen to 27.1 years for men and 25.3 years for women. I don’t know what the median age is for Mormon men and women in America, but I’m guessing it’s a couple years younger.
A few of the comments on Barney’s BCC post make some good observations. One law student commenter noted that many of his fellow law students were in long-term relationships, even though they weren’t married. This matches with my experience as well: many of my classmates lived with a long-term boyfriend, girlfriend, or fiancée, often owning property together. A generation or two ago they would have been married, but under current norms they put it off or never ultimately marry.
In a somewhat different vein, commenter John Mansfield noted that the age of first marriage for women had been creeping up after 1960, but that the average age of first marriage for men stayed steady until it shot up in 1973. He opined that this was largely due to Roe v. Wade, and that the continued lower age of first marriage for Mormons may be due to the fact that they are somewhat unaffected by the availability of abortions.
