Tim Barnard married when he was 25, fresh out of graduate school. His wife was a 21-year-old college student.
“At that age,” recalled Barnard, who is now 36, “I didn’t comprehend what it took to stay in a long-lasting relationship. It seemed that if you’re in a serious relationship and you’re committed to another person, the next logical step is to get married.”
Four years later, they were divorced. He got the credit-card debt, she got the washer and dryer.
Barnard’s marriage was typical of the many brief, early marriages that end in divorce by age 30, with no children and little more joint property than wedding gifts and a stereo. While couples in these marriages do not wed with the intention of divorcing, their temporary stay in marriage is much like the starter home of a generation ago, shed as the family outgrew it.
“The idea of a starter marriage is a fascinating one,” said Constance Ahrons, professor of sociology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and associate director of its marriage and family therapy doctoral program. “These marriages are very common, but they are not given much credibility. One must file divorce papers, but it doesn’t carry with it any societal concerns, which are really concerns about children or amassed property. Society says, `Well, who cares?’ “
Marriage and family experts are beginning to look at these brief young unions, seeing in them a barometer of society’s attitudes about marriage and divorce.
Some say starter marriages signal the need for more premarital counseling. Others have begun to rethink the whole notion of early, prechildren marriages, suggesting it may be time to lessen the legal and social burdens of divorce for couples at this stage.
No statistics are kept on such marriages, but according to the Census Bureau, in 1992 there were 1.3 million divorces among people 25 to 29, up from 253,000 in 1962-a fivefold increase-while the population for that age group did not even double in that period.
From 1970 to 1990, overall divorce rates rose 34 percent-from 3.5 divorces for each 1,000 people to 4.7-while the marriage rate fell 7.5 percent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Psychotherapists say brief, early marriages have been around as long as divorce has, although they are often overlooked in studies. “There may be no children, no property and the marriage doesn’t make headlines,” said Ahrons, whose book “The Good Divorce” (HarperCollins) is due in September. “But people still enter marriage with expectations, with dreams, with fantasies of the house we’re going to buy, the children we’re going to have. It’s those dreams of the future that get disturbed.”
Ann Patchett, 30, a writer who divorced at 25 after a yearlong marriage, said: “People think these are disposable marriages, that you just waltz out. Oh my God, who waltzes out of a marriage? My husband held on to my ankle and threatened suicide. But are you just going to stay and pay and pay and pay?”
Anthropologist Margaret Mead recommended in the 1960s that brief marriages without children be codified as “trial marriages.” Believing that it is the presence of children that should render a marriage lifelong, Mead described an alternative relationship that would last for a finite period, whereupon the couple would decide whether to have children and enter what she viewed as the more permanent stage of matrimony-or not.
Mead’s views on trial marriages pre-dated the proliferation of cohabitation. In 1990, 2.9 million unmarried couples were living together, up 80 percent from 1980 and up 454 percent from 1970, according to the Census Bureau. Some of those couples may be replacing couples who could find themselves in a starter marriage, but cohabitation has not stemmed the divorce rate.
A 1989 study by two demographers at the University of Wisconsin found that couples who had lived together before marrying divorced in significantly greater numbers than those who had wed without first living together. Within 10 years of their wedding, 38 percent of such couples had split up, compared with 27 percent of those who had not lived together.
While it is tempting to liken a brief, young marriage to a living-together relationship, there are also great differences. “In cohabitation, people struggle to get society to see them as a couple,” Ahrons said. “In marriage, it is difficult to get society to see them as individuals.” A divorce, then, is rife with “social, legal and familial uncoupling,” elements rarely present when an unmarried couple breaks up, she said.
All marriages go through stages of evaluation, typically in the first year or two and again after seven years or so, said Anna Beth Benningfield, president of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, a professional organization of therapists. At these junctures, the challenges of one’s 20s-living independently for the first time, beginning a career-can strain a marriage to the breaking point.
“They discover in their late 20s the person they thought they married is not the person they’re now married to,” said Benningfield, who has a private practice in Dallas. “A lot of adult development goes on in the 20s, and they truly may be a different person now.”
Those who have been through young marriages point to the divorce-not the wedding-as the real rite of passage of their 20s. “Marriage is very easy; divorce is very hard,” said Patchett of Cambridge, Mass. “When I left, I was the sleepwalker in the fog, desperate and crazed.”
She decided to leave her husband when she went alone to a writers’ colony and found herself happier than she had ever been with him.
Though she was resolute in her decision to leave, she was not prepared for the harsh reality of divorce. “When you marry someone, they’re your family,” she said. “When you divorce, you’re suing a member of your family for permanent separation.”
As a Catholic, she also had religious beliefs to reconcile. “Marriage is a sacrament,” she said. “You’re getting married before God. So religion is an additional level on which you have been a disappointment.”
Michael Albano, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers who practices in Independence, Mo., tries to impress the complexity of marriage on young people before they wed. He speaks to high school classes about the need to communicate in a marriage, about changing roles of spouses and parents, and about weathering the inevitable bad times.
“They really don’t know that there are going to be days when he’s obnoxious or she’s so tired she can’t deal with him, or the fact that she may make more money than he does,” he said.
Glenda Riley, who has written a historical look at divorce, “Divorce: An American Tradition” (Oxford University Press), supports the notion of a waiting period for marriage and premarital counseling offered by public agencies.
“We’re putting a waiting period on guns,” said Riley, professor of history at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. “Marriage is as volatile a situation as purchasing a weapon; yet people can get married in three days.
“It is a controversial issue-how much the state should interfere. But when you marry, it’s the man, the woman and the state. It’s already a public matter. It should be a matter of public concern.”
Others argue for more acceptability of divorce, by reducing the legal steps and striking the term “failed marriage” from our social lexicon.
“Statistically, divorce is normal,” Ahrons said. “But we still want to talk about it as deviant because we don’t want to be perceived as promoting divorce. We still don’t say, `Yes, there are starter marriages.’ We need to know and talk more about this in the next decade.”
