Is Marrying Young A Bad Idea? The 5 Questions Every Young Couple Faces

Is marrying young too soon?

In this honest conversation, we tackle the 5 core questions every couple faces before tying the knot — from emotional readiness to financial responsibilities and future growth as individuals and partners. Whether you’re in a serious relationship or thinking about the future, this video helps you feel less alone in making such a big decision. 💍

🔥 What we cover in this episode:
Why this matters
Are we emotionally mature enough?
Should we wait to travel or build careers?
What if our parents are right?
What happens if we change in our 20s?
Is it financially responsible to marry young?

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:19

Getting married young is extremely stressful, especially in our culture. Today, even if you're Catholic and if you are like us, there are a lot of questions you have about getting married young. And if you know somebody who's getting married young, or if you yourself are getting young, we hope that this is an episode you could either share or that you'll get something from. And hopefully you can learn from some of our mistakes and experiences, and you'll be leaving here edified and ready to do whatever God wants you to do next. No actual answers will be given today. Number one, when you are questioning whether you're getting married too young.

SPEAKER_03 0:48

Okay, so if you are young and you're considering getting married in the near future, these might be some of the concerns that you have. And we want to try to address some of them.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Some of the concerns you might have, or your parents or in-laws might have, or your friends might have, or your professors and teachers might have, or your priests might have spiritual directors. So these are all the things like I don't know who brings this up, but the concerns of getting married too young. All right, we're gonna give you five. There might be more, but we're gonna give you five. Number one is asking the question, and we love each other, but are we emotionally mature enough to get married? If we're getting married young? I don't think so. You are not emotionally mature enough to get married. Um, to uh I think we should put this out there first. We got married at 23 and 22. Yeah. So we were young. I look at my old, like if I my 23-year-old self, I'm 36 now, um, and I'm turning 37 soon, and then just looking at myself at 23 and be like, you knew nothing. You were a baby, you you couldn't stop your tantrums, absolutely not mature enough. Um, but I would still encourage that Renzo to get married.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

Yes. So I agree. I think that at a young age, are you still emotionally immature? Yes. Are we still a work in progress here in our mid-30s? Yes. So I think that it's just this acknowledgement of like when you get married young, you are getting married young. And you are acknowledging that you are still young when you get married. Um, but I don't think that it's necessarily like a thing you have to like master or have figured out before you need to get married. There are certainly things that you do need to sort out, but your emotional maturity, it is what it is at your current stage of life. And should you be working on self-regulation? Should you be working on controlling your impulses? Should you be working on speaking kindly and gently? Absolutely. And you should be doing that your whole life. So you're just kind of in an age where that's really a big part of, I would say, like your young 20s is when that's a big part of what you're doing is transitioning from being a teenager to being an adult. So that's just part of it. Like that's just part of the age that you are. And so I'd encourage you to take that seriously, but I don't necessarily know that that's a reason to absolutely not get married young.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

And I think this is something we're going to talk about with all the five points. Um, but one of the things that a lot of people go into marriage thinking is that they should be a finished product before they get married, instead of seeing marriage as as the process in which the Lord is going to make you into the finished product that will be ready for heaven at the end of it. Um, because marriage draws a lot of things out of you. It it makes you have to mature in certain ways in order to make the marriage work. Um, there's real grace, there's there's a real um activation of the sacrament that happens that that you didn't have before. And assuming that you will be, that you need to be emotionally mature and everything needs to be in its perfect place, you have to have the right amount of other things that we're gonna talk about a little bit later, um, is just the wrong context for how to understand marriage properly. Um, you do need to have certain things in place before you get married, but I don't know if emotional maturity is always gonna be one of them. At least it was definitely not for us. Number two, the concerns that some people have when they're getting married too young is that everyone is saying to them that they should wait because they should be traveling, they should be building their careers, they should be finding themselves first before they lock up the ball and chain and get stuck in marriage.

SPEAKER_03 4:02

Settle down and and start a family.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Because the adventure dies after you get married. Everything is awful. I've never had fun since.

SPEAKER_02 4:12

Sorry, I was trying to hold a serious face as long as I could for the YouTubers.

SPEAKER_03 4:18

Yeah, I think that um this is probably the comment that we won her the most and frustrated us the most when we were getting married young. Um largely because it was just like a such a negative way of looking at marriage that you're like, okay, do all the fun things first, do all the things to like set yourself up for success, do all the things first, because when you get married, all of that stops. It's impossible to do any of those other things. And the thing that frustrated us, I think, the most about that was like, okay, but we're already like with the person that we want to spend the rest of our lives with. So can't we just do all those things but together? So for our opinion on this, is like do that stuff together. And it definitely not to like you know, not to like not be honest, because that's what we try to do around here is be really honest and vulnerable. Us deciding to start a family early meant that our finances and our job choices went towards starting that family. So we did less traveling, but that's also partially because we just didn't that that we didn't really care about.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Right. You you definitely can't have it all if you're choosing to get married young. And it's about you both deciding like what are the things you do want to have. So I I can tell you now, you know, we're 13 years married since we got married young. Um, our careers were not where they needed to be in order to have the most amount of money in order to get married. Uh, we didn't have that in place. Uh, we had not traveled the world or the United States. Um, and that was not in place either. And uh, again, by finding yourself like you're not a finished product before you get married. So that didn't happen either. Um, and those choices led to us not being able to travel or have a lot of money early on. And I was okay with that then, and I'm still okay with that now. Like I'm okay that we, because that was the choice we made because I wanted to be with the person that I love the most for as long as possible. Um, and to me, it seemed silly to delay that in order so that I could see the world, because I would much rather spend more time with my beloved than see any part of the world. And it's only better now that I got to see, I got to see Rome with my beloved. Um, and we got to we get to travel a lot more now, um, mostly because of speaking, but still, it's just funny how that worked out for us that we we we delayed that in order to be married, and now as a married couple, we're able to do those things. So it's mostly like you make the choice of what do you think is more important?

SPEAKER_03 6:40

Yeah, and it's really a decision of like what order do you want to do things? And then if there are things that are a priority for you that come after the top priority of being together and being a family, then work on those things, but do it together. So if traveling is something that's really important to you, then like do that. Like do the things to save up the money and go travel, like put that in your calendar. If really focusing on one or both of your careers is really important because you feel passionate and you feel like that's what God's called you to do, like marriage isn't the thing that's going to stop you from being able to do that. Um, but those other things are if you put those as the top priority, they absolutely delay you getting married. So I just think that those are it's just a disordered way of doing things. Um, and our preference is to just like do those things together, um, do the hard things together, grow in our career, grow in adventure, grow in ourselves and finding ourselves and doing that together was the order that we wanted to take. And again, this is largely because we found each other young in life. So you also don't need to stop doing those things in order to try to find your spouse. Like if you haven't found your spouse yet, you haven't found your beloved, go ahead and do all those things. That's fine. Like, go focus on that. Maybe you'll find them in that process. But I think to delay being sacrament with the person that God has chosen for you guys to do that with, then why?

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Yeah. And I think it's important to also um point out expectations versus reality. Because I think a lot of us also assume that once we get married, we will be living at the same standard of living that we're living currently with our parents. Um, and that's just not the case. If you're thinking that once you get married, you want to have the same size house, same, same kind of car, same kind of things in your house that your parents currently have right now, that's just not reality. Um, at least it shouldn't be something that's holding you back from getting married because what we had to do getting married young is we had to live in a very tiny apartment in butt of a garage. Uh, we have to, we have to still drive very old, not very nice cars. Um, we had to sacrifice a lot of the things that we expected to have as a married couple in order for the reality of, you know what, I get to be with you, and that means I sacrifice these other areas, and that's okay. Number three, this is something that we have experience with. Um, if you are a young couple and feel like your parents think you're rushing, and you just want to know how to how to either prove them wrong or or maybe maybe they are right. And how do we discern if we are rushing or not? If your parents say that you're getting married way too young and they think you're rushing, what do you do?

SPEAKER_03 9:12

Why'd you look at me for that one?

SPEAKER_01 9:13

I didn't look at you, I just looked at the void.

SPEAKER_03 9:17

Um, okay, so how do we okay? One thing I'll try to address.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

You are rushing. I don't think you're rushing. I think we rushed. And I'm happy we did it. That's it. Okay. End of video.

SPEAKER_03 9:28

Fair. That's it. You are rushing and just okay. So I think that's one thing is to like acknowledge that that, like, yes, we are getting married young, probably younger than the trend, younger than the current culture, younger than maybe your parents did when they got married. So, one thing that we found is like trying to argue that or trying to reason your way out of that is useless because the fact of the matter is you are getting married young, or you're considering getting married young. And that just is like you just have to accept that um and acknowledge that and show that you can live in reality. Because I think that actually makes you seem more reasonable than pretending like you've got it all together, we've got it all figured out. Um, and just like acknowledge, like, no, I want to figure those things out together.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Yes. I sorry, I was the getting it having it all figured out. Listen, if you are in your 20s, I don't mean to be, I'm not speaking down to you, but I kind of am at the moment. You don't know as much as you think you do. And when you're in their 30s, you're gonna realize you were an idiot. And I guarantee you, when I'm in my 40s, I'm gonna think my third-year-old self is stupid. Because that's just like it's it's the called, it's the um end of history fallacy, I believe, where we can look at ourselves 10 years ago and realize how much we've grown in those last 10 years. But if we were to consider our future self in 10 years, we'd be like, no, no, we're about to, we're gonna be about the same, which is completely not true. You're gonna gain that much more wisdom, you're gonna gain that much more experience. And your parents are looking at you as a baby because they are so much more experienced or older than you. And because of that, they just assume, like, oh, you just don't know anything and you don't. And that's okay. You don't have to know everything in order to get married. You don't have to, you have to know that you love this person and you have to know how much debt they have. You have to know there's other things that we'll talk about in in future episodes about like what things you should do for marriage prep to know that your marriage is going to be in a good place that you could be successful. Um, but I don't think you need to know all of the things that adults, adults, that's old adults know in order to get married.

SPEAKER_03 11:18

In that current moment of time. And I think too, like they, your parents or the you know, aunts, uncles, grandparents, or whoever is kind of giving you this like, are you sure this is going a little fast, you're a little young. They are also reminding themselves of themselves at that time, and they they know that they didn't know it all because now they know more than they did at that time. And so they are worried about you making the same mistakes that they did. They are um, they and they also they look at you as like their child because you are that and they want better for you than they had for themselves, and they think this could be a barrier to that. So I think just acknowledging that like where that's coming from is from a place of of love and concern. It might not be the best approach, it might not be accurate, but acknowledge like where acknowledge like the truth of where they are coming from. And then for yourselves, if you feel like you're rushing, like how can we know if we're rushing, if this is the right decision or not? Um, I think that for us at least, it was a lot of um, it was like prayer, checking that we have the similar goals and missions for family life, for married life, that like, are we aiming at the same stuff? Do we have somewhat of a strategy that has absolutely been adapted and changed? But like, do we have kind of a plan that makes sense to go from where we are to the things that we hope for in our life? Um, and have we proven in our dating and engaged life that we are prioritizing the other, that we are putting them first, that we're willing to make sacrifices for the other person to have what they need and what they deserve and treat them well? Like if you've got those things, then you've got a lot of the tools to um to face those future adult things that are gonna come up in your mind.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Right. Because if you're a couple who every other week is just thinking about bringing up or going on breaks, or I just need time away from this person, then you are nowhere near getting ready to get married. But if you, if you can handle the in your current season of life, if you can handle the things that life throws at you together well, then I think you're well prepared to get married. Obviously, we have to, there's other topics you have to make sure you check those boxes that you do address beforehand. But I think the in terms of the emotional maturity we talked about earlier, to not let yourself be governed by the feelings of like, oh my goodness, no, this person might not be the right one because I don't like the way they wash dishes. Like that's let like putting things in the correct boxes in the right perspective, I think is super important in this stage before in even if whether you're engaged or before engagement to consider so that as you start moving towards marriage, you realize like this is the person I'm committing to. I'm gonna be 100% in no matter what, right? Outside of like abuse and things like that. But like you're 100% in with this person, you know everything about them. I think if you could go into marriage being completely um not wide-eyed, that's the bad thing. Like just being completely aware of everything that you're if you can go into marriage completely aware of everything you're saying yes to and the person you're saying yes to, I think you would be in a very good place, even if it doesn't feel like it to everybody else.

SPEAKER_03 14:17

Um, another piece of advice that we have for this, if you if you yourselves are concerned that you are rushing, to ask yourself the question, do I like this person? Like, are they your favorite person? Do you look forward to spending time with them? Do you want to keep spending time with them? Would you love to spend every day with them? Like, that's a really good sign that you would like to just function through life together. That like you, you just you find them endearing. You've you think they're one of the best people ever. And then like if you really feel that way, then like why wait? Why wait to spend like the rest of your life with that person who's great and awesome?

SPEAKER_01 14:51

And we'll do another episode actually. Uh, the next one we'll do it on marriage prep and how you should be prepping for marriage. But in the meantime, I plugged this every episode so far. Um, we did write a book called Love Making, How to Talk About Sex with Your Spouse. It is also very good to use in engagement um during marriage prep because this will uncover a ton of things that could be under the surface you didn't realize the other spouse had to deal with or or had hard issues with. So um again, you're you may not be able to convince everybody out there that you're not rushing, but you could definitely make sure within your relationship that you are not rushing and that you are looking at everything the way you should be. Everything is out in the open and you're saying yes to this person with the in in their entirety. Number four, the questions that they might have is what if we change a lot in our 20s? Like maybe I'm in love with this person the way they are now, but even like I mentioned in the earlier part, like we're gonna change so much in 10 years. What if I like you and I love you in my 20s, but I don't in my 30s and 40s? What do I do about that? Too bad.

SPEAKER_03 15:48

No, that's just now you're stuck. Um, so again, going in and just recognizing like we are not gonna be the same. We are going to change in certain areas of our life, we're gonna become more ourselves. Like we're gonna be more that person, the thing that you love about them, the thing that you find endearing, that could be like heightened and and flourish, and that could, and that would be wonderful because in your married life, you get to fully be yourself. Like if your spouse allows that, and like that's what marriage is bringing out of you is the best parts of yourself, then beautiful. And then there's gonna be things that like, where did that come from? I didn't see that while we were engaged, like I didn't see that while we were dating. And it's like, yeah, well, there's two different things. You weren't spending every moment together all the time, and now adult life is starting to happen, and you're starting to adjust to the things that come up, like children or in-laws now who like weren't the same because you were dating and now they're actually like part of your family, jobs and friends and moving and like all these different things. It's gonna bring out a lot of stuff. Um, and like, yes, you are not gonna be the same. You're going to change a lot in your 20s. The opportunity, the invitation when getting married young is to grow together and to do that together, to encourage one another and also to kind of like charitably point out, lovingly point out things that have that could use growth, that could use improvement, that could use virtue.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

I think uh actually I agree with everything you said. Um, it's about first time ever. No, never. Uh, it's about growing together. You're going to change. It's 100% um that you're gonna change, but if you change in two different directions or if you grow um side by side with each other, that's really up to you two. Um, it's really easy to feel like um you marriage is gonna provide a lot of opportunities for you to become roommates, and it's up to the two of you to not let that happen. Um, a lot of the things that marriage is gonna challenge you with, it's really gonna be up to you and how you cooperate with grace in order to let yourselves grow together. Um, if your faith is not at the foundation of your marriage, that is going to be a huge struggle. Um, and not I'm not saying at the foundation of like, oh, we're both Catholic, or like, oh, we both went to this retreat this one time. Like, if you are not on the same page of how we both went to the same Catholic college. Yeah, like it's gotta be, or like, oh, we both were focused missionaries. Like whatever you were, um, it once you say I do it, that kind of becomes irrelevant because now it's about what you are together. You become a new thing, and that new thing has to have a particular view of faith and it has to be its foundation in order to continue to grow together. Because our faith kind of forces that on us and in what it teaches on on married life and family life. Whereas if we only one of us prioritizes our faith, the other can really be free to go do whatever they want and then kind of grow in different different directions. So I would challenge that. Like, yes, you are gonna be different in your in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, but it is your faith going to continue to keep you together. It could be the glue that keeps you together where you can grow together.

SPEAKER_03 18:49

Yeah, and I think that you made a really good point about um, like it's it's kind of irrevol irrelevant what that like past faith connection was because like that was a great springboard. We both this, we both this, and like we were on the same page, we were aligned in our faith in this area at this time, but like you can't just like always go back to that and be like, okay, our faith, our marriage is strong because of that thing that we did, that we had, that we believed at this time earlier in our relationship. You have to continue to pursue relationship with Jesus yourself, like as your own individual person. And then now as a married couple, you have to pursue a faith life together, a joint prayer life, a joint spiritual life. So you can have your own charisms, you can have your own like ways of communicating with the Lord, but then you also, as a united married, to become one flesh, also have to do that together and discern together and pray together and always pursue grace together.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

And number five, the most controversial one, isn't getting married young financially irresponsible? That is an easy one. The answer is yes, it is financially irresponsible. If irresponsible means you have no money, then getting married young means you are financially irresponsible. Done.

SPEAKER_02 20:05

There you go.

SPEAKER_03 20:06

And that's just partially because like rice and beans, what else do you need? Yeah. Partially that's just because like that's your current financial status as a young 20-year-old. Like that just is. And like one of one of the jokes that we would say in our early 20s was like, well, we're either poor separate or we're poor together. Some might even argue that financially it is responsible because now we're not paying two different rents if you're not living at home.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Some might argue that we're still poor. So the in so yes, it's financially responsible, but I think I think it's I think it's important to keep in mind that the end goal of our lives is not to accumulate as much wealth as possible in order to be able to pass it down to generations and generations. That is not what our lives are supposed to be. Um, and I think it's important to keep that in front of us. Um, there are better financial decisions you can make than get married. Um, but that doesn't mean that it's those are the best decisions for your life in order for you to get to heaven. Very different things, right? If if depending on what our goals are. We were saying, as we said this whole episode, like I wanted and we wanted to be together. And that was our goal. We knew right off the bat we weren't gonna have enough, we weren't gonna have enough money to live the way we wished we could live. And that was okay because we got to be together. And then same came in, like, was it was it financially responsible for us to have a baby when we had a baby? No, because we also had a dog at the same time. And then when the second baby came and the third baby and the fourth baby and the fifth baby, none of those were financially responsible. Um, because if you again, if you're thinking financial responsibility is acquiring the most wealth possible in order to be able to grow wealth in the future, having a kid is way too expensive. But as Catholics, we don't see our kids as burdens, but we see them as gifts. We also don't see marriage and what burdens may come from that. We don't see them as burdens themselves, like we see them as gifts. And and this is a gift the Lord has given me. He's given me my beloved so early in my life and that I was ready to just say yes and tackle whatever was in the future with her instead of having to do it without her.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

And there's certainly the call to practice prudence, which is a virtue, in all areas of your life, including your finances. So it doesn't mean like, oh, we got married young. So like we will always be poor and we should just accept that and never do anything about it. We should just like resign to that fact and not pay attention, not care.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

If I get five different credit cards, then it's like we just keep paying them off in a circle. That's called the vicious cycle of debt.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

Okay, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

No, so well, in so well, and we'll I think we can tell well, again, in the marriage prep episode, I think this will be perfect of like you could be financially responsible in getting married young, but you also should know how debt works. You should know how much fight like loans you have each other, you should know how to budget through the through the weeks.

SPEAKER_03 22:40

So getting married young is not necessarily the best financial decision that you'll ever make in your life, but that doesn't mean that you are imprudent. You could still be very wise with your money, you could be very practical, you could be very reasonable, and you can work with what you have. Um, part of again, like this, we'll share more, but like part of it, our current financial status is also because we feel very called and we've made this decision to pursue the jobs that we have, and for one of us to be primarily a stay-at-home parent. And like, so are those the most financially responsible decisions because they're not wealth building? Like, just strictly financially speaking, no, but for our whole family for the big picture, that is the best decision. So, again, it's like rightly or ordering these questions, these concerns, not ignoring them, not pretending that they don't exist, and just like anyone who brings it up is like they're ridiculous. They're they have a point, but we're gonna put them in their right place. So if you have found somebody that you are very much in love with and they're very much in love with you, and they show that through their behaviors, they show that through their um their prayer, they show that through their own individual life, and you happen to be young when you find that, then here are some ways that maybe you can address some of the concerns of your age.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

Yep. So we're not saying get married or don't get married, but I think that these things that we brought up today should at least start conversations that can lead you to being more confident in your decision, whatever, whatever it ends up being. In the next episode, I think we'll really tackle into like what if you're you're saying yes, we're getting married, we are engaged, we're ready to go, we're gonna talk over the things that we think you should talk about in your marriage prep. Um, because let's face it, marriage prep stinks nowadays. Uh, but for today, thank you for being here. Like, comment, and subscribe on the video. If you're listening to us on Apple or Spotify, review the episode, leave us some kind words in the comments because I need it in order to keep going, in order to keep doing this. And if you haven't already, I'm gonna plug it again. Buy our book, Love Making, How to Talk About Sex with Your Spouse, a Guide for Everyday Couples. I'll put a link in the show notes.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

We'll see you at the next episode.