Youth: Teen-Age Marriage

You got that feel, learning good, You’re ready now, girl, You’re ready now.

Or so lots of the teen-age hippies swinging to Franky Valley’s rock-‘n’-roll hit think. Last week a group of psychologists and educators gathered at the San Francisco Medical Center to discuss how teen-age marriages fare. The background statistics were chilling in themselves: 40% of today’s brides are between the ages of 15 and 18; within five years, half of teen-age marriages end in divorce.

Why do teen-agers get married? And what goes wrong? Pennsylvania State University Professor Carlfred Broderick sees it beginning when they decide to go steady (more than half do), terms this “the beginning of the end.” Says Broderick: “It takes little or no effort to get more and more involved; before they know it, they are slipping and sliding into marriage.” For boys, sex is the driving force (at least 35% of teenage brides are pregnant when they marry); the stronger the moral code, the more likely that the teen-ager will marry early.

For girls, as important as sex is the desire to “love.” But an early expectation of romance can soon be replaced by harsh reality. Disillusion is especially rapid when the husband has to curtail his education or children arrive too early.

The teen-age marrieds present on the panel tended to agree that escape into early marriage is risky at best. One part-time secretary who was born illegitimate herself confessed she had yearned for security. A pretty cocktail waitress who was wed at 17 said, “I was marrying to get out of home.” Bitterest of all was a girl who married at 17, is now in the process of getting divorced. “My parents trusted me too much,” she said. “In a way, it’s too bad giving kids too much time for things they’re not ready for.” For her, the future is bleak. Said she: “I have a little boy of two and a little boy of four, and they’re too much for me. I’m not grown up yet.”

What would the teen-age marrieds advise their own children to do? Said a 19-year-old motorcycle enthusiast who had to sidetrack a law career and go to work in a cement plant when he found his wife-to-be was pregnant: “I don’t think it’s a good idea for young people to get married; there are too many things to do then. But it’s so hard for a teen-ager to say, This is my judgment,’ when in your own experience you don’t know what you’ve done until it was done.”