Young Marriage

The year was 2004, I was 20 and my bride to be was 18. We were young and dumb. Completely children in all senses. I am now 28 with a one year old. I work, go to school full time, and father my son while being a husband to my wife. It is exhausting. I am juggling all I can just to keep things together. I now have 20/20 retrospect on my life leading up to this point of struggling through life with a full schedule, low income, and far from extended family. Eight years in the corps really put things off; things like my future with a family that I had established at a ridiculously young age.

Looking back with that 20/20 vision on how my life would turn out, and how things would develop as I got older, I have to ask, would I have changed things? Would I have waited until I was older and more established in life to marry? Should I have gone to college before I flirted with the idea of being a father? No. I wouldn't change a thing.

I have loved every day the Lord has blessed me with the most beautiful woman I have ever met. Some people thought, and think I am crazy when I tell them I have been married for eight years. What was I doing, they ask. Well these are my thoughts on marriage at a young age.

In my previous post, I had explaind why I thought myself a man at eighteen. I was ready to take on the world with a stick and beat it into submission. This is the point: God made woman for man so that he would have a helper, a mate. It wasn't good that man to be alone. I was a man and I needed a mate; a true woman by my side. It was not good for me to be alone.

I can now say after my very short eight years of marriage that it is good, good to have a wife to grow with. It is not good to grow, and then get married. When you marry young and start a family, you are growing with your family. You don't grow alone in your ways, and fantasize about what a wife and child should be like.

I have truly come into my own because I had a wife by my side. I have always told people, if you treat a male like a boy he will never grow up. He will shave but he will be a child. If you give a child man shoes, he will grow into them and become a man.

To the boys that say it's too early to marry, or I want a career first, or I want to experience life first, I say grow up. Nothing is stopping you from fulfilling your dreams. Why not grow with a woman while doing that? Have a partner with whom to do it.

It is only in recent years that society has made it taboo to marry before 30. Since the dawn of time, marriage has been something you do before you step out into the world. Don't fear marriage. It is not an end but a beginning; a freeing of the child as he grows into a man.

Life is short and God made it glorious to enjoy, so enjoy it as God meant it, with your favorite rib.