Top 10 Reasons Early Marriage is Better than Late Marriage

Are there any even downsides?

10. Early marriage is more natural

For all of human history, people married early. See here for a data review on this. Some think that this means that delayed marriage is an improvement; on the contrary, social practices need to be optimized when there is widespread poverty. Robin Hanson has been accessibly blogging on this since at least 2024. My scientific work agrees with his sketches. As an early marriage practitioner, I can confirm my wife and I are very happy with our decision to not delay marriage into our 30s.

9. Early marriage is more romantic

Early marriage means less sexual experience upon marriage, ideally even virginity. This is obviously more romantic than marrying with a large body count. Your spouse becomes your first love, not just the last in a trail of heartbreaks. Most romance stories are also between young people under the age of 25. People under this age might feel romantic love more passionately than older people.

8. Early marriage is more beautiful ; breakups and celibacy are ugly

Early marriage means less breakups and less celibacy throughout life, as well as less sex outside of marriage. Breakups are ugly and immoral, most people are not designed for celibacy and finding it extremely frustrating, and the only alternative is sex outside of marriage, which is risky, unloving, and gross. Thus, early marriage increases the amount of beauty in the world by decreasing the amount of ugliness.

7. Early marriage prevents wasting time dating or being sexually frustrated

Dating is hellish and I feel bad when I see dating discourse. By being early married, I know I will never date again, and that there are no downsides to this. I don’t have to be celibate, and I don’t have to miss out on having a family, because I am married for life. If you had contemporary dating culture, you should support early marriage.

6. Early marriage improves the TFR

Dropping the average age of marriage by 10 years would increase the TFR above replacement, by about 1 extra baby per couple, according to an econometric causal-inference study. The increase is modest due to the presence of family planning, but it’s still positive. If you are pronatalist, there is no downside to advocating for more early marriage. It has a lot more positive spillover effects while being cheaper than the main alternative that pronatalists have to early marriage, which is promoting IVF for very late couples.

5. Early marriage cultivates life-long love better

There are no causal inference studies I’ve found that find the effect of age on divorce risk, although cross-section data usually gives a U shape which shows marriage in your 20s is better than marriage in your 30s. Lyman Stone found that among people where early marriage is normal, the best outcomes were when marrying under the age of 25. Marrying over 30 was associated with poorer marriage quality.

4. Early marriage lets you have kids earlier which makes it easier

Say you have to have a certain number of kids. Do you want to be 45 waking up at night to feed them as babies, or 25? Do you want to attend their high school graduation when you are nearing 60, or 40? Kids take a lot of energy, so being in your 20s and 30s is better for coping with it. You will also see more of your grandchildren, the earlier you have kids. There are biological analogues to this; pregnancy is easier in younger women, and sperm has less mutations in younger men. Babies born to parents in their 20s are slightly healthier than babies born to parents in their 30s and older.

3. Early marriage is a better motive for a strong career

It’s important to not have wicked motives for making money. Single people who don’t want to make the world better who chase money likely have wicked motives for it. This is ugly. If you have a family, however, supporting your family is a good motive for chasing money. If many people are not wickedly greedy, you might even expect that marriage causes men to pursue more money, which boosts the economy in a system where most of the money to be made is through positive-sum interactions. Indeed, Cremieux has showed data indicating this. Even if the games are neutral-sum, it has the side effect of taking money from wicked greedy people, like Sam Bankman-Fried, and giving it to less wicked men who will use it in part to reproduce, which could be consider eugenic or a socially-positive evolutionary pressure.

2. Early marriage prevents STDs

Arguably a huge reason why marriage evolved, and evolved to be early, STDs are a huge problem and usually kill you without modern medicine. Treating STDs is a huge sunk-cost as well. More early marriage means lower healthcare costs and healthier people. Easy win!

1. Early marriage is what God intended ; it improves the Culture

Religion (Christianity but also other major world religions) promotes early marriage for a reason. Thinking in a more secular way, I’ve already listed 9 spillover effects of early marriage. I’m sure there are broader, unexpected effects as well. Radical feminism would probably recede in the public space. The demographic pyramid would be less tilted towards the elderly. This has downstream effects on the community. Things begin to be more family oriented, child-friendly, etc. All of this seems positive to me.