Marrying Older, But Sooner?
If you have been involved in helping people get married you’ve noticed that median age of people getting married has risen over time. This is somewhat true … In reality the trend was that in the 50s & 60s people where getting married at a younger age than was typical. Even more intriguing to me is that as life expectancy has grown longer and longer the percentage of their lives that they are married has grown significantly. Almost 3x what it was 100 years ago! [Click here to see the female version of the above chart.] Some impacts of this trend might be …
- What are young adults? // Some ministries go pretty negative on the “non-married” young people attending their church … labeling this period between the end of college and marriage as a “second adolescence”. Our churches need to embrace this reality and not alienate this group from our church!
- Release This People! // Paul was pretty clear in 1 Corinthians 7 that there are some distinct advantages for the gospel to not being married. How can we cast vision for this group to leverage this unique time for the mission of Jesus?
- New Pressures? // People are married for a long time … “until death do us part” means 3x as long as it did for people 100 years ago. What pressures does this place on marriages that didn’t exist back then?