Saving Yourself but Rushing Into Marriage?

I have a high school friend who was raised in a church-going family and got married right out of college. In her late 20s, she admitted to me that while she and her husband have a great time together, most of her other friends are still single or living with their boyfriends. "I don't really know why we got married so young," she said. What I wanted to say — but didn't — was "Because you wanted to have sex!" For some couples, saving themselves for marriage means getting married sooner rather than later. Not surprisingly, some evangelicals are encouraging couples to marry younger, but modern-day, abstinence-practicing lovebirds sometimes find it difficult to balance that with their peers' tendency to get married later in life. To discuss this dilemma, . Think of it as a wholesome twist on the traditional shotgun wedding, with its own complications:

The call for young marriage raises questions: How young is too young? What if marriage is viewed as a ticket to guilt-free sex? What about the fact that marrying young is the No. 1 predictor of divorce?

A recent story in Christianity Today, titled "The Case For Young Marriage," acknowledges that it's unrealistic to expect couples to save themselves for marriage if marriage isn't happening until their late 20s or early 30s. But the article doesn't endorse premarital sex; it merely suggests that the abstinence message may be coming on too strong. Megan and Jay Mkrtschjan also got married right out of college, and the groom says it had a lot to do with sex. But now the couple says getting married young may have helped them, since they worked out their early hardships while both were still maturing, rather than getting married older, when both were set in their ways. Do you think that abstaining from sex leads to earlier marriages? And if so, is there really anything so wrong with getting married young?

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