Do you all ever feel shortchanged by your culture's insistence on early marriage
 

and child bearing? Do you ever feel as if you'd been robbed of some elemental and possibly necessary experiences because of the age at which so many of you married and had kids?

I'm not looking for a recounting of the joys of marriage and kids etc. I'm asking if you feel like you've missed something, despite all the good it's brought to your life, by marrying and procreating at a young age.

Maybe this post is in the wrong place, but given that the acts in question spring from the church to which most of you belong I suppose it makes as much sense to put it here as anywhere else.

Yeah, a little bit.

My brother likes to joke about Mormons marrying young. He's always saying things like "Bring'em young" and "That's why we swing!"

Seriously, though, you may have hit on a major cause of the Mormon mid-life crisis. I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with some Mormon's use of pornography either.

Married at 27 and first kid at 30. I had friends get married early, have kids early and been grateful the whole time and felt like they never missed a thing. I've had friends that married early and did feel like they missed out on some fun and actually ended up divorced.

I think it all depends on if you're the type to take advantage of the single life or if you're going to mope around and be sad because you don't have anybody in your life.

Nope. I wish I married earlier.

I married at 24 and my wife was 21. We didn't have kids for another eight years so I can't comment on that part. Since I was always a guy who wanted to have a girl friend, rather than date many, marriage even at that age was a good fit for me. I don't think I missed out. My wife, however, wishes in retrospect that she had been older when we met, that she had been able to do a semester abroad, live away from home before we got married. She wishes we had been more mature when we got married, but agrees with me that there is sort of a window there were you are mature enough to be married but not so set in your ways that it is hard to adapt as I think can be a function of age.

By the way, I believe that this is a cultural emphasis rather than a doctrinal one. I certainly know that there are many who have undergone tremendous hardship because they have reproduced early and often before they were out of school, though of course they wouldn't ever trade their kids. Perhaps the payoff is that they are out of the house sooner and you get to enjoy your time alone with your spouse before you are too old to do some of the things that age makes more difficult.

When did you get married and do you wish you had gotten married earlier or later?

Oh man. I'm not even going get started on this thread.

My wife's one regret is that she wishes she could have gone to her junior prom before she was married.

The reason they do it is they don't want people to have sex before they're married. It's that simple. They know the practical impossiblity of saying, "Women and men, finish your education and start a career before having kids; have a good time, date, see the world, there's no hurry, the more mature you are and the more you get out of your system the better decision you're likely to make," and saying, "If you fornicate you're going to hell."