She is 16, a junior in high school, and planning to marry her 19-year-old boyfriend when she turns 17 this summer. She says she’s “done the math” and figured out that it would be better to marry now than to wait until she graduates from high school particularly since it would also get her out of her parents’ “not-so-great” home. She says she’ll use birth control but “if there is a mistake” she’ll “take care of it and love it.”
I said:
I know you feel that what you want to do is right for you and that your love is unique. So did most of the other teen brides who found themselves wishing that they had waited a few years before making what should be a lifetime commitment.
Getting married to get away from a “not-so-great home” is a very bad reason to get married. Being married will add a whole new list of responsibilities to your life and it may be sooner or it may be later that one or the other of you will start feeling that you’ve missed out on a lot of things because of the decision you made.
If you have a strong love for each other it will last while the two of you get an education (without being married). If your love isn’t strong enough you’ll find that out and you won’t become another divorce statistic.
I wonder what you’d tell your own daughter if she was planning on marrying so early.