Ronnie Mitchell describes himself as “20 and very immature” when he married.
“But I was drafted into the Army and matured pretty quickly with a year in Vietnam,” recalls the pastor of CrossPath Church, formerly known as East Ridge Baptist Church.
In the premarital counseling sessions that are part of his pastoral duties, he’s found that couples in their mid- to late 20s “are very interested in getting their education out of the way and other things they would consider to be a distraction to marriage,” he says. “In some respects, that’s a good thing. I think a lot of marriages that end in divorce were marriages that started too young without considering the costs.”
It’s a fact that today’s newlyweds form a different sociological profile from their parents. They are waiting longer to marry — average bride’s age is 29 and groom’s 31, according to theknot.com — and that’s if they marry at all. More couples are choosing to live together first, resulting in an increase in children born out of wedlock. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of births to unmarried women is 40.6 of all births.
Andrew Walker, with the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, proposed this solution: Millennials — folks born mid-1980s to early 2000s, also known as Generation Y — should marry younger. Walker believes marrying earlier would decrease cohabitation rates, lower premarital sex statistics and the risk of childbirth outside of marriage.