Why Are My Friends Marrying So Young?
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This April, Millie Bobby Brown, the (no longer) child star of the Netflix hit Stranger Things, celebrated her engagement to 21-year-old actor, model, and progeny of a rock star Jake Bongiovi. When Brown first showed off her ring on Instagram, the internet dissolved into something of an existential crisis. The phrase “She’s 19” started trending on Twitter as users panicked over her decision to marry before she could legally toast a glass of champagne and compared their own life progression to that of the millionaire starlet—never a wise game to play, if you ask me.
As a fellow, albeit somewhat more geriatric, member of Gen Z (I’m 26), I have to say that I wasn’t quite so shocked by Brown’s decision. Off the top of my head, I can count 14 couples in my social circle who have decided to head for the aisle—all within the past three years.
According to research from The Knot, Americans did marry an average of three years younger in 2022 compared to 2021, but this puts the average bride at 30 and groom at 32. Most of the couples I know who got engaged in the past few years were fresh out of college—and all live in major cities, where people tend to wait longer to put a ring on it. It seems like something distinct has happened to my peer group in the past few years, something, daresay, unprecedented.
I was 22 when the pandemic hit. I was 24 when I received my first vaccine. I had expected to spend those years establishing myself as an independent adult. Instead, I had spent them eating Cheerios in my childhood bed. I was suddenly, inexplicably, a college graduate in my mid-20s. I wanted—and still want—some hard evidence that those years had not been lost, that I had progressed along with them. And what’s harder than a diamond?
Scrolling through my increasingly bedazzled Instagram, I got the sneaking suspicion that some of these blushing brides might share my anxieties. For young people who felt that their futures had been wrenched off the rails by the pandemic, a wedding might feel like proof that they had successfully muscled their lives back onto a recognizable and linear path.
When I asked Lisa A. Owusu, a New York–based jeweler who specializes in wedding and engagement rings, whether she thought the pandemic might have shifted young people’s priorities around marriage, her response was unequivocal: “Absolutely.”
She had returned to her studio, Charlton & Lola, after lockdown expecting requests for memorial pieces, maybe jewelry embedded with locks of human hair, as was fashionable in Georgian times. “There was a lot of darkness around that time,” she recalls.
Instead, she was “inundated” with orders for engagement rings and, the following year, wedding bands. “I would’ve thought people would be scared of moving forward,” she says. But rather than grieving the past, her customers seemed to be investing in their futures. It left her “amazed at the human capacity for hope.” Since June 2020, when the diamond district reopened, she estimates that her business has been up 25 percent.
David Alan, another New York–based jeweler, shared in Owusu’s pandemic spike in engagement requests—but not in her shock. Alan opened his studio in 2000—nearly 15 years before Owusu entered the industry—and he has seen similar booms twice before: once in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and again during the 2008 financial crash. “When the shit hits the fan and everything in the world is uncertain,” he explains, “people really wake up and realize what’s important to them.”
While Alan and Owusu have seen a spike in engagements across all age groups, wedding planner Jacquelyn Aleece says that her client base has leaned notably younger in recent years. Aleece, who splits her time between New Jersey and California, founded The Wedding Plan & Company in 2011. Today, she works with over 200 couples each year across the country as well as a few international clients. Up until the pandemic, most of them were between ages 28 and 35. It had seemed to her that clients generally wanted to be sure they had locked down their career and education before getting hitched, but “post-Covid, it was very much the opposite,” she says.
Aleece has some theories about this shift. One is that college kids didn’t get to go out and meet people at bars and frat parties; instead, they had the time (and government-mandated) space to build deeper, emotional connections with their partners. Some may have financial anxiety and feel pressure to combine incomes. And then, of course, there’s good old-fashioned existential dread. “Our industry rarely hurts during times of crisis or economic downturn,” she says. She figures that young people who saw their future dramatically destabilized by the pandemic may have simply looked at one another and said, “Hey, life is crazy. Let’s not do this thing alone.”
In her book Love, Inc., sociologist Laurie Essig argues that “the worse things get, the more we turn to romance to feel hopeful about the future.” Take, for example, the diamond engagement ring, which wasn’t a thing until shortly after World War II. At a time when almost nothing about the future felt secure, the De Beers diamond company promised that “a diamond is forever,” and the American public ate it up. The campaign, says Essig, is now considered “the best advertising slogan of the 20th century.”
Essig thinks something similar might be driving the changing marriage trends these wedding professionals are observing. “I think we’re scared. And I think scared makes sense,” she says.
But most of the young spouses and spouses-to-be I spoke to gave different explanations. One 25-year-old I connected with on the Reddit thread r/Zillennials said that he and his girlfriend of three years (also 25) were considering marriage for “strictly fiscal reasons” as they neared the cutoff to remain on their parents’ insurance policies.
Amelia Stepanek, who got married last month at 23, didn’t see marriage as an anchor in a world that felt unmoored—just the opposite. The instability of the pandemic was actually liberating for her and her husband; it gave them carte blanche. “We decided, to heck with what anybody else says,” she tells me. “If we wanna get married just because we wanna get married, then let’s get married! If we wanna have a wedding because we want everyone to get together, then let’s just have a wedding! Let’s just do it.”
And for Tatjana Freund, an editor and close friend who got engaged last November at age 24, seeing her relationship remain totally stable when the rest of the world seemed to crumble gave her the confidence to take the next step. While she doesn’t think the “pomp and circumstance” of a wedding matters in the long run, she’s excited to have an excuse to bring people together and celebrate after so many years of social distancing and celebrating over Zoom: “I feel like we missed a lot of rites of passage,” she tells me. “I want to mark this one.”
When I first started seeing my peers leave lockdown and enter marriage, I was baffled. Hadn’t we just spent two years in our parents’ basements? Didn’t we want to be young? Have new experiences? Take risks? Be free? But after speaking to the newly and youngly betrothed, I realized that the impulse isn’t so different from the impulse that drove a college classmate of mine to scrap a meticulously outlined 10-year corporate plan to travel the world and work on farms, or that drove me to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing—a dream I once imagined chasing as a retirement passion project (if at all). We’ve learned that the futures we plan for are not guaranteed. Why wait to go for what we want?
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