<p>That doesn’t mean they are DOOMED, that just means that roughly half of the people who get married, at some point in the relationship, didn’t try hard enough to make the right choices.</p>
<p>The fact that they fail means that those people shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place.</p>
<p>Then again, if they want to keep marrying and divorcing, that’s fine by me. More jobs for lawyers.</p>
<p>Personally I wouldn’t touch divorce law with a 200 foot pole, but this means less competition for the jobs I do want.</p>
<p>I disagree. No matter how ready for marriage you are and how utterly perfect you may be together, your marriage WILL be challenged, and you have to make a choice each and every day to do what you need to do for your marriage. Roughly half of couples may choose wrong at some point down the line and not know how to fix it, but they were perfectly capable of making the right decision. The word “doomed” implies that failure is inevitable, and that is almost never the case.</p>
<p>For the people that divorce, marriage, not divorce, is the wrong choice.</p>
<p>I don’t think divorce is the “wrong” choice for many people who divorce. If you don’t get along, you should be free to terminate the arrangement.</p>
<p>gstein: “Lets be honest, how many times in college does sex in an uncommitted relationship not involve alcohol?” </p>
<p>I wouldn’t know. I never drank to get laid. It was never necessary, and like I said, I went all the way through college without booze and without weed. I didn’t even smoke regular cigarettes. It’s a myth that you have to use drugs and/or driink alcohol or you won’t have any fun in college. </p>
<p>Getting married early is not the best thing for most people, although I realize it does work for a few people.</p>
<p>Just to throw this out there about the having to drink to get laid, I did a summer program at a college this last summer. There were 80 of us, 35 guys, 45 girls and each of us had a single. </p>
<p>Lets just say there was plenty of fun had, with no substances involved. Now I don’t know if that was just because they were all desperate and away from their parents for a month or what, but if it’s an accurate foretelling of what college is like…</p>
<p>My husband and I met in college working the late shift in an on-campus coffee house. We got married nine years later (after grad school for both of us). We’ve now been together for 30 years (OMG!). Our oldest son is leaving for college in a few months. I wonder if he will meet his life partner there . . .</p>
<p>Plainsman: I went all the way through college only having sex with one person. How is it that your decision to abstain from drinking and drugs is somehow more acceptable than my decision to abstain from casual sex? I mean my god, how do you know in 20 years you won’t realize all the fun you missed out on by not going out and drinking like everybody else! You’ll be old and tied down and it will be too late! </p>
<p>I mean, it couldn’t possibly be that some people just don’t need the experience of alcohol and drugs, since it’s apparently so highly unlikely that someone wouldn’t need casual sex.</p>
<p>The thing about college is that it is one of the most amazing, chaotic and unpredictable periods during a person’s life, and being able to successfully pull off a meaningful, long-term relationship during that time in a person’s life, bodes well for the prospects of that relationship continuing past school and into marriage. Moreover, depending upon the passion of how the individuals feel about their associations with their alma mater, a college marriage can have those extra factors working for it.</p>
<p>I married my college g/f. Celebrating our 23rd Anniv later this month. Best thing that every happened to both of us. Amazing experience. </p>
<p>Here are my takeaways…in no priority:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>There will never be another time in your life when you will get to know someone as well as you will in college. The problem later on is time. When you work, and the people you date work (post-graduation), it becomes harder to find the time to REALLY get to know them.</p></li>
<li><p>you will also get to know ALL of their flaws in college. Hard to hide certain character traits when you have the amounts of time to spend with one another that you do in college. My wife and I were both somewhat immature in college (weren’t we all), but we both knew we would mature each other up over time and push each other to become better persons. It was a positive for us.</p></li>
<li><p>are you about hooking up or are you one of these people who really believes that monogamy is for you? If the latter, college is a great place to find THE person. The key is this – you have to look in the right places. Meeting your match at a fraternity/sorority party, on the intramural fields, through friends on campus, etc can lead to a better match than meeting someone at a nightclub in Chicago. Of course, you can get lucky meeting someone fantastic while working in a nightclub, but the odds are less than in college and you will have to devote real time/effort to bridging the fact that the odds will be against you.</p></li>
<li><p>For me, it is about the person. If you meet someone that special EARLY in life, you may want to act on it. If it doesn’t happen and no one comes into your life that special, wait and keep looking after school, in graduate school, in work, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>One other interesting thing – all my friends that fell in love in college and married shortly thereafter are still together and most all of them have something “different” or “extra” in their relationships. I would call it a “love affair” going on and on and on. Of course, there are exceptions. People can choose just in poorly in college as they do/will later on in life. However, if Oprah were to interview these 10 couples, my wife and I included, I think you would see a very interesting and powerful dynamic that is much harder to create when you marry when older/working. It also seems our friends who wanted to “gain experience” before marrying are far less happy in their 40’s and 50’s with the person they chose. Their marriages seem more like a law firm partnership than a love affair. Just another data point for you to consider.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>SB</p>
<p>Emaheevul07: Ask any college student which would they prefer, sex or alcohol and drugs? Ask any college student which is preferable, sex they can remember or sex they can’t remember? Add booze and drugs to sex and you can’t remember the latter. </p>
<p>The best sex in college or adulthood is stone cold sober sex. Sow your wild oats (sex not alcohol) in college and forget about marriage or looking for someone to marry. I’m willing to bet young marriages fail at a higher rate than marriages after age 30.</p>
<p>I’ve stepped out of my horizons a bit and have been drinking a bit even though I never did for my college career. Being drunk doesn’t mean you won’t remember things. I’ve been drunk, fooled around, and remembered just fine the next day everything that happened. </p>
<p>I think having sex drunk or not is fun, and wouldn’t really pick one over the other.</p>
<p>Though I don’t think you’d fine the one drunkenly hooking up with random people, though I’m sure it has happened.</p>
<p>Either way, after a 2 year relationship in college and only a year left, I figure I won’t find “the one” here. I’m fine with that, though I would like to be thinking about marriage by 27 or so.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That actually isn’t true. I posted this a few pages back, but here it is again: [Did</a> I Get Married Too Young? - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204575039150739864666.html]Did”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204575039150739864666.html)</p>
<p>Until I read the article, I would have assumed the same thing.</p>
<p>We met in college–he in grad school, me in undergrad
and many of our friends met their match in college…</p>
<p>worth really looking at whether the college
culture" matches your values etc</p>
<p>The 50% statistic is VERY misleading. It looks as if some people are just prone to divorce because if you look at the actual statistics:</p>
<p>The divorce rate in America for first marriage is 41%
The divorce rate in America for second marriage is 60%
The divorce rate in America for third marriage is 73%</p>
<p>You see that the divorce rate is only 41% for “your first true love” but goes up substantially for each concurrent marriage.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m not saying you participated in it, you don’t have to to know how often it occurs. While I drink, I surely don’t engage in such affairs.</p>
<p>After college is not really considered “early”, plenty of people do it. There is nothing wrong with finding your significant other in college, and getting married afterwards. My point was that your whole “waiting till grad school” idea is goofy. Like I’ve previously said, after college, getting married is about maturity levels. If you need a couple years after school and a couple of years of grad school to mature, then that is your deal.</p>
<p>A lot of people don’t want to have serious relationships in college because they want to “hook-up” with other people and “explore” themselves. I just have this to say, you can explore yourself much more deeply with someone who cares about you, and putting your dick in a girl whose name you don’t even know isn’t about learning about yourself, it’s about being young, reckless, and having fun. So while I’m not one to hookup with girls, I can accept that it’s an acceptable social norm in college.</p>
<p>As for getting married, why does there have to be an “age” when you are supposedly ready? How can you say “I think I’ll be ready to get married when I’m 30 or 26 or whatever?” Why isn’t it that you just get married when you find the right person and you find the right time?</p>
<p>Everyone always wants to throw out a statistic or a put a number on everything. How about you just take it as it goes.</p>
<p>We found each other in grad school; had apartments across from each other. Married about four years later.</p>
<p>Well I say late 20s because I want to be able to do other things. You have to realize, after you get married, things do change and sometimes you feel restricted. Sometimes you can’t do the things you want to do or else it can affect the relationship. I don’t think I’ll be ready for marriage within the next 5 years (I’m 20 right now). Maybe not even 10 years. For all I know, I may never get married. I can deal with that.</p>
<p>“Sometimes you can’t do the things you want to do or else it can affect the relationship.”</p>
<p>This is true if you are in a committed relationship regardless of it you are married. My aunt keeps telling me, “but what if you want to jet off to europe for the summer?!” For starters it’s not as if my fiance would tell me I couldn’t as long as our bills are paid–which is an issue regardless of if we are married or engaged or just together, and it isn’t as if I could just jet off anyway without considering how it would affect him. Just because we aren’t married doesn’t mean that I can do whatever I want with no concern for his feelings or needs. I can’t think of any freedom I actually have now as someone in a committed relationship that I am giving up by marrying, except the freedom to walk away which isn’t something I want in the first place. </p>
<p>Having kids, though, would be another story-- and we are choosing not to do that for another five years minimum. That is something we’ll just have to figure out as we go along, though, like everything else.</p>