Marriage Prenup

[Edward]

I understand the Dutch Reformed approach in which, even today, a common expectation is that many women and many men will be engaged by their senior year in college and married soon after graduation.

I was in college a half century ago and that wouldn't have guaranteed someone would have taken virtue to the altar even back then.

 

[darrellmaurina]

I was in college a half century ago and that wouldn't have guaranteed someone would have taken virtue to the altar even back then.

Half a century ago would be 1975. A case can be made that colleges in that era were a pretty good guarantee of the opposite!

What I was trying to communicate wasn't that colleges were a good guarantee of virtue, but rather that the Dutch Reformed tend to encourage marriages MUCH earlier than is the norm for college-educated professionals, i.e., engagement by senior year and marriage shortly after graduation. That's not universal, of course, but common. The underlying concept is balancing two legitimate Christian principles: a married couple should be able to support themselves, which usually isn't possible in college, and unnecessary delay of marriage is an invitation to immorality, particularly once young adults are employed in full-time jobs and no longer living with their parents.

I don't want to get into the issues here of whether women should work outside the home and whether married couples should use birth control. Those are issues on which we don't have anything close to the consensus we have (correctly so) in the Reformed world that Scripture forbids sex before marriage.

What I do want to say is that in an era before widespread availability of birth control, and when married women usually often were required to quit their jobs and pregnant wives were usually required to quit once they were "showing," saying that a man should wait until graduating from college made sense because it meant that he had a job capable of supporting his wife and likely soon-to-come children.

I don't think we can be dogmatic on issues where Scripture is not crystal clear, but I do think we need to be seriously reconsidering what has become the norm in American society of young professionals deferring marriage until their late 20s, or in many cases, well into their 30s.

 

[Edward]

I don't think we can be dogmatic on issues where Scripture is not crystal clear, but I do think we need to be seriously reconsidering what has become the norm in American society of young professionals deferring marriage until their late 20s, or in many cases, well into their 30s.

I married young. I had barely turned 39.

 

[ZackF]

I married young. I had barely turned 39.

35 (when I married). I had always thought I was “young”

 

[Miss Marple]

As an observation, I'd add that later age marriages probably have something to do with declining birth rates. Not to get too off topic.

Harder to have a large family when you marry at, say, 30 instead of 20.