On Marrying Young: The Unsettled Life

Although marriage is often referred to as “settling down”, for young couples, early married life may not be all that settled.  Young married people are in many of the same circumstances as their unmarried peers: they are students, just starting their careers, and moving from place to place.  Although I have known young couples who married just out of college, both spouses found stable jobs in their desired fields, and they were able to purchase a condo or starter home within the first year of marriage, this is by far the exception and not the rule.

When my husband and I married, I knew that I was sacrificing the ability to plan out my future.  I had just graduated from college but I didn’t know if I would be able to find a teaching job if I moved to Indiana to join my husband (I wasn’t).  As the wife of a grad student, I don’t know where (and if) my husband will find a job when he graduates in May.  And since he is looking for postdoctoral positions, the job he does get will only be for one to three years, thus pushing back buying a house and planting roots in a permanent place even further out.  While our specific circumstances are unique to us, I know many other young married couples that feel the same sense of living a transitory, unsettled life.

Lacking the “stability” that is often assumed to accompany married life can add unneeded pressure to a young marriage.  Starting a career is difficult enough for any young person (especially with the current unemployment rate) without the added stress of knowing you need to help support a spouse or a family.  It also can be quite difficult for two people to start a career at the same time without being able to move for a job.  I would have had a much better opportunity to find a teaching job had I stayed in Colorado where I had connections in the local school districts or if I had been able to move anywhere the jobs were.  But marrying my husband meant that I needed to move to where he was completing school, so my dream of getting a teaching job was replaced by the simple desire to get any job that would help my husband pay the bills.  I never thought I would be so excited to get a job at Starbucks, yet this is only one example of how marriage has changed my whole perspective. 

Since we don’t know where we are going, we have to rely on each other all the more.  I am not by nature an adventurous person, but I’ve been able to approach our future and each new opportunity or hurdle as a new venture that will bring us closer together.  Moving first to Indiana and then to North Carolina only a year later, we’ve been able to start a new life together just the two of us, without the outside pressure of our families and friends.  Marrying young means that I get to be there for my husband at the beginning of his career to support him; and I will never take for granted the work he does to support our family because I’ve seen from the beginning just how much he has sacrificed and how hard he has worked just to get to this point. 

While I still wish we could put roots down somewhere and I’m anxious to have a home of my own where I can actually paint the walls, especially with a little one on the way, I wouldn’t trade this unsettled life with my husband for a more stable life on my own.  It has been difficult not knowing where our lives are headed, but it is a great comfort to know that wherever we end up, we’ll be there together.



Please check out the other posts (including some great guest posts) in my On Marrying Young series.