Is Tying the Knot at Twenty Like Leaving A Party At Pre-Drinks?

This time fifty-odd years ago, there's a good chance that if I wasn’t already married with a dress to conceal a hefty baby bump, it certainly wouldn’t be long before I was. It would have been unimaginable to sit, the way I had tonight, listening to Hannah compare our marital status’ to an average Saturday night pre-drinks with the girls. 

Just like I would never go home several Jaeger bombs and a bottle of wine later, I would never get married at 21, either.

And that isn’t because I think it’s wrong to get married in your early twenties and it’s not because I have a problem with people who do, either. I may not want to get married at 21, but I’m a big believer in doing whatever you want and making your decisions for you and nobody else.

The reason why I don’t want to get married at 21 is because I don’t want to get married yet. There’s not even a slither of space for marriage – it hasn’t even entered my head as something I will be embarking upon in the near future. In the same way I organise my food shopping, I don’t want to skip to aisle 23 when I haven’t even passed the glossy magazines at the front entrance. But, girls my age - girls I consider to be very similar to myself in a lot of other ways, do want to get married now. Some are married now, and I couldn’t help but wonder why there’s such a sharp divide. I wanted to get to the bottom of the true reasons why I would never want to get married at a young age.

I don’t feel the necessity of it at an age where I’m financially unstable. I want the big dress that I can afford to buy and the perfect reception which I don’t have to budget. I imagine the girls looking beautiful as bridesmaids and a guest list big enough for there to be plenty of men for them to dance with/(let’s face it now) pull. And very importantly, I want a honeymoon, which means I can be a Mediterranean Princess for two weeks. And who cares what that sounds like - it’s your big day and it should be the way you’ve always wanted. After all, haven’t we been planning this since we first discovered Disney's eternal and endless array of princesses? There’s no way on this planet I could fund that kind of wedding now.

Marriage doesn’t secure a neatly laid out life plan, but if I got married now, I feel like life would be a sliding slope towards nappies. I am a massive baby person but, building a career plays a major role, and I always wanted to do that first. In ten years I will be 31 – and I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. So if I do all the things I want to do in the space of two years, instead of ten, sure I may be young, but will I have rushed things?

And what comes after the wedding (apart from the honeymoon)? A couple of years of newly married bliss followed by lots of babies (or three) a few years later? If I walked down the aisle now, I would have done all that by 25. It scares me that I could be 25 with a husband, children and a stack of ironing. Not to mention a Smeg fridge, crammed with organic god-knows-what and a freezer full of fish fingers and smiley faces for emergency evenings where I have no organic foods left to feed my 21^st century nutrition-imposed children.

Of course, none of the above would be an issue, if it wasn’t for the fact that at 21, I don’t entirely feel like I know what I’m doing yet. There are things I’m sure of and things I’m not so sure of. It’s a sort of limbo space between adolescent and adult. Being young gives us an excuse to make mistakes; we’re still learning, we’re still finding our feet and if we trip along the way then it’s okay, we’re forgiven. But marriage isn’t an impulse purchase in Whistles that you can return once you realise you can’t afford your rent. It’s not spending £100 on a night out, or missing the last train home. It’s not falling down a flight of stairs in a nightclub and knocking yourself unconscious - It’s real and it means something and you have to be sure you’re ready. And if I’ve done all of the above in the not-so-distant past, then surely I’m not ready to a) stop doing those things (even though I clearly should for my health) and b) get married.

The age we get married is quickly becoming a debate of our generation, and it gets quite bitchy, but why? There’s such a divide circling the topic; the girls who don’t agree with getting married early, the ones who see no advantage, and the ladies who are either engaged or married already. And of course they will defend their choice- because that’s a decision they’ve made, I'm sure, for a very good reason - one not to be questioned by me or anyone else.

It is interesting, however, that over the age of 25, no one seems to give a second thought. The average age for a woman to be wed in the UK is 28.9 and for men, 30.8. Whether you’re married at 26, 28, 31 – there’s a clear window of time where it’s a non-issue. Sure, if you get over a certain age, there’s the combined sound of biological ticking and voiced concerns of family members which get louder every passing minute, but being under-25 with a ring on your finger and you don’t warrant the same widespread reaction. Congratulations may be in order, but as unfair as it may be, the news can be also quite shocking. And I’ll admit, maybe this is why young women don’t want to get married early, because of the way society may view their choices. Who can blame us? We’re only human and it’s so easy to be dictated by what other people think. Maybe the women who do get married at a young age, just don’t give other people’s opinions a second thought. Hoorah to them, because I couldn’t do it.

My last, and probably most important point which may have been worth mentioning earlier was that I have a boyfriend who definitely doesn’t want to get married yet either. And lets face it, you can plan a wedding without the input of a man, which I fully intend on doing by the way, but you can’t propose to yourself. Maybe it’s not about whose getting married when or how many girls on your Facebook have tied the knot before 22 – maybe it’s about meeting someone who wants the same out of life as you do (at the same time and in the same order). At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the fast train, you just need to be on the same track and you’re already halfway there.