DEBATENATE

Topics / Everyday life

The challenge

“Young men should wait until their thirties to get married”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Get married young. Not recklessly, not at seventeen, but don't park your life until thirty waiting to feel finished. The median age for an American man's first marriage is about thirty, the highest the Census has ever recorded. Do young men look like they're thriving? Marriage doesn't need a finished man. It makes one. Economists have found for decades that married men out-earn comparable single men, and plenty of them argue marriage itself pushes a man to step up. Proverbs eighteen says he who finds a wife finds a good thing. It doesn't say eventually. You'll say young marriages fail. Teen marriages do. Twenty-four isn't seventeen. Let me ask you this. If you meet a woman of faith and character at twenty-four, what exactly are six more years of video games going to buy you? Wait for the right woman. Then don't wait.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. We already tried wait-till-thirty as a culture. It didn't produce a generation of thriving men. It produced delay.

    Census Bureau data put the median age at first marriage for men at about thirty, the highest on record.

  2. Marriage grows a man up. He doesn't have to be finished first. Responsibility builds him.

    Economists Korenman and Neumark found married men earn more than comparable single men. How much of that marriage itself causes is still debated.

  3. Scripture treats finding a wife as a blessing to go after, not a chore to put off.

    Proverbs eighteen says the man who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Marrying young is risky. People who marry very young divorce more often, so waiting protects you.

Nate: That's true for teenagers, and nobody here is pitching a wedding at seventeen. The steep divorce risk is in the teen years, and after that waiting buys you less and less. Maturity matters more than one more candle on the cake.

What he grants the other side

Teenage marriages do divorce at much higher rates.

The lines

Sources

  1. U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Marital Status Tables: Median Age at First Marriage (2023)
  2. Korenman and Neumark, Journal of Human Resources, Does Marriage Really Make Men More Productive? (1991)
  3. The Bible, Proverbs 18:22
  4. Nicholas Wolfinger, Institute for Family Studies, Want to Avoid Divorce? Wait to Get Married, But Not Too Long (2015)

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