How to get divorced by 30

On marrying young... and the discourse

The critical thing you must do to get divorced by 30 is marry young. Now, in the relatively urban, educated spaces I’ve existed within my whole life, this is not exactly standard advice. While I wasn’t the only one of my friends to get married young, I was definitely an outlier among the women I met in New York. But at the time I didn’t feel like it was young to make such a decision at all. I was ready to commit. Marrying sooner rather than later seemed completely reasonable, especially since it would make it easier for us to be together (I’m Canadian) and since we’d obviously get married eventually anyways. Plus, my parents had gotten married at 20, so 24 didn’t seem all that crazy to me. And, of course, I was very confident that I was very mature for my age. (I wasn't like the other young brides!)

No one was against me marrying young; after all, everyone in my family agreed that I was mature for my age. But at the time, no one in my circle would’ve suggested this was a generally good idea for young educated women. However, things have started to shift. More people are getting woke to declining fertility rates. And as more people have started to worry about the impacts low fertility might have on our social and economic future… they’ve been looking around for cultural culprits. And one of those potential culprits is the norm of getting married later in life. After you’re educated. After you’ve dated a bit and been single a bit and have gotten to know yourself and what you want. After you’ve gained some financial stability. After you’ve focused on your career, and have made sure you’re on the “right track”. After you’re a fully formed, functional, emotionally regulated adult.

Cartoons Hate Her recently wrote a popular post on the subject, The Men Who Sabotage Women’s Fertility. She argues that we’ve unreasonably pathologized marrying young and that we should normalize young women asking for early proposals, clear timelines etc., particularly in light of women’s much shorter fertility timeline. Her point is that it’s reasonable for a young woman to want to know if the guy she’s with will eventually marry and have kids with her well in advance of her bumping up against the limits of biology. Speaking from her personal experience as a woman who wanted to get engaged right out of college, she describes how those around her reacted to her concern that her boyfriend (now husband, her fertility was not sabotaged) wanted to wait. Apart from telling her to “enjoy being young” and assuring her that he likely just wanted to to be “financially stable” first, she says:

The comment that stuck with me the most was the one about our ages—never mind that we had already been dating far longer than is necessary to know if you want to marry someone, but if Nick was “too young” to propose, then that inherently meant he was too young to decide whether I should be his wife. Was the idea that I had to give him time to decide? Decide on what, me? I should tolerate that the man I 100% knew I wanted to marry wasn’t 100% sure he wanted to marry me? I knew we were young, but marriage wasn’t about needing a wedding, a ring, or “half his stuff.” It was about having some kind of definitive promise that he had chosen me. And if I was simply his live-in girlfriend indefinitely, I wasn’t being chosen. I was being tried out.

This shift in age at marriage norms is often summarized as a shift from cornerstone to capstone marriage. The cornerstone marriage sees partnering up as a foundation upon which you can build a life with someone while maturing and developing together. The capstone marriage sees partnering up as something to do once you’ve built your own life and once you’ve experienced enough to know what you really want and need. Both can clearly work—this article from IFS presents data which found there was only a mild disadvantage to marrying young in terms of relationship stability which was counterbalanced by a mild advantage in terms of perceived relationship quality. But… it didn’t work out for me, and it didn’t work out for precisely the reasons people bring up when they warn younger people about making such commitments!