It’s a common expression of derision: “A lot of girls show up just looking for their M.R.S. degree.” This line, which you hear mostly from college students and recent alumni, is a very particular form of the “I’m not like other girls” trope.
The line is not only snooty, it’s also misguided. One of the best things about college is the lifelong friends you can make, and that might include your future spouse. In fact, I’ve argued, this is a good thing to keep in mind while choosing a college.
The issue has reentered the online discourse:
Camp, a libertarian writer, makes a good strategic point here. College is a target-rich environment.
Author Thomas Chatterton Williams said that Camp is wrong:
Williams is correct that people change a lot between age 20 and age 30. We also change plenty, although at a decelerating rate, between 30 and 40. Under Williams’s framework, every year you wait, the more rational marriage is because the closer you are to the person you will always be.
I think this framework is totally wrong. Specifically, it has a too-atomized view of the human person.
I see Williams as a devotee of individualism. Much of his work involves battling against the worst parts of identity politics. His foe is the type of thinking that erases individual difference and agency.
This is a fine fight, but I think it’s not the main front of our culture war. In general, modern man’s enemy is not collectivism but hyperindividualism. Put another way, Alexis de Tocqueville aptly warned that when we become atomized, we all become one indistinguishable mass.
My colleague/boss at the American Enterprise Institute, Yuval Levin, writes often about conflicting conceptions of institutions, such as employers, congregations, and government bodies. Some see an institution as a platform from which to advance oneself, advance one’s agenda, or proclaim one’s beliefs. Others see an institution as a mold — a place where we adopt a role and we are changed.
And so here’s where the anthropologies clash. Being shaped and molded by other people, including by their expectations and their demands on you, is not bad, I believe. It’s central to being human. Man is a social animal, and that doesn’t merely mean we like the company of others. It means that who we are is significantly determined by our interactions with others.
I spoke this fall at the convocation of Benedictine College, a Catholic college in Kansas.
I started with a line Taylor Swift had used at New York University’s commencement: “I know it can be really overwhelming figuring out who to be, and when. Who you are now and how to act in order to get to where you want to go. I have some good news: It’s totally up to you. I also have some terrifying news: It’s totally up to you.”
Taylorism, I told the Benedictine students, is a bad philosophy. I offered a contrasting one:
“We all talk endlessly about identity and forget that our identity is not some custom creation of our imagination, but it is really the sum of the roles we play in the various little platoons to which we belong — the family, the school, the church, the football team, the neighborhood.”
To bring this back to marriage, I see marriage as an institution that ought to mold us more than any other worldly thing in our lives. The younger you get married, the more supple your character is, the easier it is to be molded by your marriage, to be changed from a self-actualizing person into a husband, wife, father, or mother.
Yes, getting married too young carries risks, but I wouldn’t pin that on the fact that you will change a lot after age 20. I pin it on the fact that many 20-year-olds are not very mature. Would I counsel someone to get married at age 20? Probably not. But to meet someone in college and marry them a little bit after graduation seems to me like it would often be a formula for happiness.
Waiting until you are fully formed as a human before marrying can be a mistake. People can calcify in their 30s. If you had 10 years as a solo adult to develop your own habits and ways of life, it can be harder to adapt them to your husband or wife — and marriage is all about accommodation and adaptation.
Marriage expert Jason Carroll, though, notes that this idea of adapting to the other person is going out of fashion: “One of the defining features of modern dating is this attitude of ‘I’m trying to find a relationship that fits my life,’” Carroll says. “However, most successful marriages involve two people who do the exact opposite — they choose to fit their lives to their relationship.”
It comes back then to your view of the individual person: Are we supposed to make ourselves into our selves and then find where we fit in the world, or are we supposed to throw ourselves into the world and let our friendships and relationships form us?