Early to Wed
While their college peers perfect the casual hookup and their older sisters and brothers delay marriage until later and later, a small number of college students are bucking both trends and committing to "I do" while still in school. A look inside the lives of these quiet rebels.
Clockwise, from top left: Kristin Huang, 22, and Yi-An Huang, 25; Luke Langford, 23, and Amy Langford, 23; Patricia Arevalo-Castillo, 22, and Erik Castillo, 27; Luke Suttmeier, 22, and Allison Kuhns, 20.
(Photos by Tim Llewellyn)KRISTIN HUANG'S RIVERWAY APARTMENT HAS A DISTINCTLY JUST-OUT-OF-COLLEGE FEEL: A halogen lamp lights up the small living room, purple milk crates serve as bookshelves, and shoes line the narrow hallway. Otherwise, her domestic life is atypical for a 2007 graduate of a Massachusetts college. The 22-year-old got engaged during the fall of her senior year at Harvard, spent spring semester with what she calls a "fourth class in wedding planning," and married Yi-An Huang - who was two years ahead of her at Harvard - a few weeks after her graduation last June.
Eight months later, over a dinner of spicy beef and rice, the Huangs say they love married life - which, for Kristin, has been inseparable from post-college adult life. As committed Christians, they did not want to live together before marriage, as many of their peers do, nor did they want to wait until they were closer to the median age for first marriages in the United States, now 25 for women and 27 for men. In Massachusetts, brides and grooms are among the oldest in the country: The median age here is 27 for women and 29 for men. "Once we knew that we wanted to get married eventually, we were thinking, 'Why not now?'" says Kristin. "We were excited about the possibility of spending life together for the rest of our lives, and we wanted to start that journey sooner rather than later."
The journey, they say, has brought challenges and surprises for both. Kristin, now a first-year student at Harvard Medical School, sometimes feels out of synch with her new classmates and spends less time with them than she would like. "I definitely spend more time at home than I would otherwise, if I weren't married," she says. Then there are the usual challenges of adapting to living together, the sort many couples now experience before putting rings on their fingers. "She sleeps funny," jokes Yi-An, 25, who works as a consultant to nonprofits. "She sprawls and moves around."
His new wife slaps him playfully. "He sleeps like a mummy," she says.
In embarking on marriage when she did, Kristin is an anomaly among four-year college students, especially in the Boston area. Most local colleges and universities reported no more than three married or engaged students; several didn't know of any. At one school, the dean's receptionist just laughed when I asked to interview some married students. "Married?" she repeated. "These kids don't even date anymore. I don't think we have any who are married."
It's no surprise that college students in the Northeast rarely marry while still in school, says sociologist Paula Aymer, who teaches a class called "Family and Intimate Relationships" at Tufts University. Fear of divorce, high student debt, and greater acceptance of premarital sex have all lessened the appeal of early marriage, she believes. While approximately 11 percent of Massachusetts weddings have brides or grooms between the ages of 18 and 22, the young people who are going to the altar are usually not the ones attending four-year colleges. "College-educated middle-class young people," says Aymer, "are marrying much later."
Seen in one light, then, students like Kristin Huang may seem like throw-backs to an earlier era, when the few women who did go to college were urged to get their "MRS degree" along with their BA. Seen in another light, these students are quiet rebels against the middle- and upper-class idea that one's college years and early 20s are - and should be - a period of extended adolescence, of exploring oneself, of trying out different identities, career goals, and relationships.
Many of the marrying undergrads I met struck me as unusually focused for their age. All had definite career goals and seemed eager to get going on the project of adult life. Many say they never had the desire to date more than one person or experiment romantically and that, due to their religious values, they would not consider living together or sexual intimacy before marriage. Confident in their professional and personal goals, they see marriage as a powerful symbol of having achieved "real" adulthood.
Luke and Amy Langford, both 23, are cheerful, outgoing blonds who married last January, when Luke was a senior at Harvard and Amy a newly minted graduate of Wellesley College. One Sunday before choir practice, they invite me over to their tidy apartment in East Arlington, where everything from the dining table to the television set to the Christmas ornaments looks new. Luke, who now works for a business consulting firm, says he was eager to feel like a full-fledged adult: Marriage, a new job, and the brown microsuede living room set were all part of the package for him. "Every college dorm has a futon or a cruddy sofa," says Luke, and buying "real adult things" upon his marriage felt significant. As Mormons, both Langfords say they always expected to marry young, and the close alignment of their life goals gives them confidence in their future compatibility. They waited to have sex until after they were married. Amy, now a campus recruiter for Deloitte Touche, wants to be a stay-at-home mother, and Luke prefers a stay-at-home wife. He loves that Amy brings out his "inner goofy side," while Amy is confident that Luke will be an excellent provider. They both agree that early marriage is not for everyone, but take pride in their own ability to make the commitment. Marriage, says Luke, "is a choice about how mature you are and how willing you are to commit." Amy adds that their peers who don't even consider or plan for marriage in their early 20s may well be stuck in a kind of "perpetual adolescence."
Her words made me think back to the first peer wedding I attended in 1999, three summers after graduation, when two of my classmates from Brown University got married in the campus chapel. Marriage was not on my radar at that age, and I remember thinking my friends looked like little dolls dressed up for an elaborate pageant - she swimming inside a huge white gown, he stiff in his crisp tuxedo. Later that night, after the reception ended, the college crew gathered up all the leftover alcohol we could find, headed for somebody's hotel room, and spent several hours telling one another how strange it felt to be friends with married people. (Six years later, when that couple called it quits, we would tell one another how strange it felt to be friends with divorced people, but that is another story.) What we meant by "strange" was, essentially: We do not think we are old enough for marriage, but our friends are doing it and they're the same age. So we've got to wonder if maybe we should be doing it, too.
Consider that a 2006 Gallup Poll found that Americans consider the "ideal" age for marriage to be 27 for men and 25 for women - which just happen to be the same as the median ages. What is ideal, then, is what most of us do; what is strange is what most of us do not do. But what strikes me most about the Gallup Poll is that fewer than 10 percent of respondents said they had "no opinion" on the ideal age. No matter how much we talk about soul mates, love, and individual developmental stages, we are nonetheless wedded to the idea that there is an ideal time for marriage, unrelated to a particular individual. And the ideal, today, is for both men and women to spend at least a few years in the workforce before tying the knot - to establish themselves as responsible adults before marriage, rather than looking to marriage to help make them adults. The students who choose to marry younger are bucking that trend.
And these students are finding that, because the college years aren't considered an ideal time to marry, most schools are organized around the assumption that students won't have a spouse. "The few students I've known who got married when they were undergrads really had to work to continue to be part of their social group," says Denise Darrigrand, the dean of students at Clark University in Worcester. She says that while the unmarried are socializing, studying, and living together - at all hours - married students typically live off-campus and keep different schedules. "Marriage," she says, "can be very isolating."
Langford experienced that sort of social isolation during his final semester - though he says that in some ways, he preferred it. As a married senior, he couldn't live with Amy in Harvard's undergraduate housing. The couple could either live with graduate students or move off-campus, and they chose the latter. Suddenly, Luke was out of step with his old roommates. "Instead of going to class, then taking a nap, then hanging out, then working late at night, I'd get up when Amy got up for work, take the bus to Harvard Square, go to classes, do all my work in the library, and then go home," he says. He grins and says he was surprised how efficiently he got his work done that term - and how good his grades were.
LUKE LANGFORD'S GOOD GRADES COULD serve as useful ammunition for Allison Kuhns, a junior who will marry senior Luke Suttmeier this spring. Both are students at Gordon College, a Christian school in Wenham. A slender, curly-haired history major, Kuhns says she is often frustrated when people assume her desire to marry young means she doesn't care about her schoolwork - or have career goals. "There's this kind of assumption from the female perspective that as soon as you get married, you become a housewife," says the 20-year-old, who hopes to earn a PhD in ancient history. When she tells people she's engaged, they often advise her to make sure she finishes school and doesn't have children right away. "My response is, 'Of course,'" says Kuhns. "My future is very important to me, but he happens to be involved in my future." Kuhns considers herself not a throwback to the MRS era, but a focused young person who knows what she wants.
She knew she wanted to marry Suttmeier, 22, when they met during her freshman year. Kuhns and Suttmeier say the question for them was "when," not "if," and they decided to marry right after Luke graduates largely so they could save money by renting only one apartment. "It seemed like the time that was right for us," says Suttmeier, a history major from Saugerties, New York.
Kuhns's parents, Cynthia and Michael of Mount Vernon, Maine, are happy for their daughter and confident in her decision-making skills, but would have preferred she experience "real life" and paying rent on her own, even if only for a year or two. "My big question was, 'What's the hurry?'" says Michael Kuhns, an environmental engineer and part-time pastor who will officiate at the ceremony. "Can't you at least finish college first?" He's concerned that the responsibilities of marriage could distract his daughter from her schoolwork.
Yet, according to Norval Glenn, a sociologist at the University of Texas who studies marriage trends, undergraduates like Luke Langford and Allison Kuhns may actually do better in school than their unmarried peers. In an e-mail, Glenn says that in his experience teaching at a school where a significant number of students wed before graduation, married students perform better because they are "are more settled, less distracted by looking for sexual adventure, and probably more motivated. I also suspect that the married students spend less time partying, drinking, and so forth than the unmarried ones do."
PATRICIA AREVALO-CASTILLO, A MARRIED 22-year-old Boston College senior, seems to agree with Glenn's hypothesis. A lively young woman with sleek black hair, Arevalo-Castillo was engaged as a freshman and married as a sophomore to the man she started dating when she was 16. Her friends - and her professors - were concerned for her schoolwork, but she believes husband Erik Castillo, a union carpenter five years her senior, has helped rather than hindered her academics. "I didn't have the need to 'live a little,'" says Arevalo-Castillo, who grew up in Chelsea and Revere and now lives near the BC campus with her husband. "Erik has supported me in everything I've done, so there was no reason to wait." While she does feel separate from mainstream social life at Boston College, she says her marital status isn't the reason. "I'm not much of a partier, and BC has a very big party lifestyle. Erik and I were both more stay-at-home, rent-a-movie people."
Like Allison Kuhns, Arevalo-Castillo finds that some of her classmates equate early marriage with a lack of professional ambition. But her biggest frustration when it comes to her peers is ethnic stereotyping. When Arevalo-Castillo, whose parents emigrated from El Salvador, tells classmates that she's married, she says they often assume she already has children. Sometimes, they don't even ask if she has kids - just how many and how old they are. "Being a Latina woman, that's very offensive," says the math major, who plans to get her master's in education at BC and then teach high school. "It's important for me to break that stereotype." She also says she is often surprised how many classmates feel entitled to ask why she married young, even when they barely know her.
I sympathize with that particular frustration. Never married at 33, I get the other question - "Why haven't you yet?" - and am very aware how quickly the mantle of defensiveness passes from the married to the unmarried. Indeed, I've often thought that in my particular social circle, the only way to avoid having people worry about you is to settle down at precisely 27 1/2. Younger, they worry you don't know yourself well enough; older, they worry you'll never find anyone.
In the course of reporting this article, I confessed to an old friend that part of me wishes I had married young. Life would be so much simpler, I sighed; I'd be safe from the minefields of dating in the 30s. So she reminded me what being 23 felt like, how uncertain we both were of who we were (or even what toppings we wanted on our pizza) and how immature our romantic relationships were. Then she said of my young interviewees, "They may seem happy and focused now, but aren't they all going to have midlife crises at 35 or 40?" Well, maybe - anyone might - but I hope not. And despite the late-20s "ideal age," statistics show that while teen marriages do have a significantly higher divorce rate, once the bride and groom hit 20, they become no more or less likely to split up than their friends who marry at 27 1/2 or 37 1/2. If sticking together is the measure of marital success, there really is no "ideal age" once you're out of your teens.
As Luke Suttmeier, the engaged Gordon College senior puts it, "I know people who've gotten married out of high school and are still happily married, and others who have done everything by the system and it hasn't worked out. You have to go with what works best for the two of you, as opposed to what everyone else thinks works best."
Alison Lobron, a freelance writer in Cambridge, contributes frequently to the Globe Magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
