Anyone who thinks they can choose a mate without God isn't ready for marriage and they can count on their arrogance to lead to failure. I prayed and let God literally pick my mate. Like Gideon, I used multiple signs as divine confirmation of approval. I also discussed it at length with elders and spent my youth praying and prepping for marriage with my pursuit of goals.
Maybe so, but I'm not speaking to your particular experience, but the rule and why it's a bad idea for seventy percent of the people who feel like, going in, it's the right call.
What limitations? What are you talking about?
The same thing I've noted from the beginning, the biological and also (for most) the experiential limitations.
Unless we are talking marriage while drunk in Vegas, it's not impulse that leads to marriage. It's typically months of courting and counseling. It was for me.
Well, no. It's not typically months of courting and counselling. But I'm glad you went through that. As with your outcome, it's exceptional.
Young adults do possess intelligence, and you make them sound like biting toddlers.
It isn't about intelligence at all and nothing you can quote me actually writing does anything of the sort... It's about thinking with the wrong part of the brain because the part that's meant to do the reasoning for you is under repair. It's about a biological impairment and a want of life experience. And however you want to frame me, it doesn't alter the objective fact of what happens, seven times out of ten, when someone under that mark marries.
But instead the problem that leads to their divorce is a hard heart.
Whatever the reason and there are many, from sex to finances to a want of maturity the end result remains for most, tragic. And so, for most, it's a bad idea.
The Bible and our biology actually points in the other direction.
Sorry, but you're just wrong. Biology makes it less likely that you'll be using the part of the brain that's designed by God for good judgment and more likely to heavily rely on the impulse control deficient part of the brain that is embroiled in the more purely emotional response to experience.
To say you don't need your wife is pretty cold.
No, it really isn't. It seems that way to you because you stopped growing in that way before you could encompass it. That said, I think life has already taught you a little about it but you haven't recognized it. I'll explain that in a minute.
Ever tell her you could be happy and have a good life without her?
Part of what she liked about me from the beginning was that I was happy. I made her laugh. Or, as she put it, she liked what she saw, but she loved what she heard.
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So what I'd be likely to say is that she has made me happier. I wouldn't want to have my life without her. It would be lessened by her absence.
Or Jack what? You said your husband made you happy. Okay, you started in the hole, to the extent it caused you physical troubles, but then you had kids together. Your kids didn't make you even happier?
You tell them that? You tell them, "I was happy before you were born"? But you said you were. Then you were happier still after they came. That's life telling you what I was and you not considering it enough to find the point.
I don't think it works that way now, and I don't think it worked that way when you married. I don't think it's very nice to say "hey, I'd have a good life without you, but it's better with you here." "I don't need you but I like having you around."
Supra. Though by now you should be willing to retract what you obviously experienced yourself.
Or, to encapsulate, I was happy, had a good life before I ever set eyes on my wife. I was happy with my wife for years before Jack announced himself. Both added to my happiness and gave me the opportunity to return the favor.
Don't marry a person unless you really need them.
Never marry a person from need. That's something in you that you need to deal with. Marry from love, which is a desire to give. It's an abundance, not a need.
Especially since you could easily live your whole life happily alone and others don't do so well.
I doubt most people ever try, though it wasn't my goal to spend my life alone. I knew life could be improved by sharing it and it was.
Marriage isn't a little upgrade.
I never said it was, never even implied it. I don't tend to attempt to quantify joy. I don't know why anyone would, outside of a stab at poetry. Marriage is a contextual shift for happiness and a joyful addition to it, is its own, unique experience. So is parenthood.
Marriage isn't an act of impulse unless you make it that. Most states insist on counseling and a waiting period for their residents to avoid just that.
What I said was that we are creatures of impulse and desire, but that those should be ruled by wisdom.
Some on this board claim I sound like a 15 year old with no judgment.
You do sound young. It might be because you still are or because that's how you patterned when you truncated the learning curve. My wife's mother married young like you and I notice that in some ways she seems much younger than her years.
Those are the same ones who claim the only reason an older man would marry a younger woman is for lust and manipulation of her.
I'd say if a thirty something year old man is looking at girls instead of peers it speaks to a problem of some sort. It might be a bad experience with them or a desire to recapture something lost. It doesn't have to be sinister or an insurmountable problem and needn't be a desire to cause harm or control, but it raises flags in part because so many of the usual things that make for compatibility are missing and because of what we know about young people in terms of their want of experience and tendency to impulsive behavior rooted in emotional response.
Ironically, this whole thread long we've been acknowledging how women can so easily take their men to the cleaners with the way laws are set up these days.
All sorts of things go into how a judge deals with property in a divorce, beginning with fault. Maybe some here without much real experience with the law were speaking to old, traditional notions and popular distortions or conflating an anecdote with a rule. I don't know. I haven't been reading a lot of the other conversations given time constraints.
The need isn't a virtue but by virtue of that need people are born into this world, even when the marriage fails.
Kids in single parent homes suffer. If we can, by forestalling for a few years, arrive on average at a union that will provide a more stable base for them it's another reason to wait.
I'm so glad that my husband's mother had him even if her young marriage failed while producing him. I don't think that was a bad gamble.
Thinking should lead you back to the fact of the matter and a conclusion at odds with your feeling, not in the particular case, but as for the general rule of it.
The numbers and science don't point to universal failure.
No one said otherwise. But if I told you that you could take this vaccine and thirty percent of the time it would make you a better person in the long haul and help you find a happier existence, but that seventy percent of the time you'd get cancer I doubt you'd be frantically rolling up your sleeve. Because they're horrible odds.
Worse, other people will suffer along with you, most of the time.
If the numbers and science say most 8 year olds can't swim, do you keep good swimmers out of the water just because they are under 8 or do you just accommodate them like you would an older child who can also swim?
In this case, eight year olds have underdeveloped arms and they can't be good swimmers, only lucky floaters. If seventy percent of eight year olds who attempted to swim drowned would you say the important thing is that thirty percent didn't?
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lain:
If God sent me a mate earlier in life, maybe that's because He wants me to have more children.
That's a read in. It suits your narrative. It isn't necessarily so. Maybe in your immaturity you asked for something you would have been better off without that early but it worked out anyway. Maybe God did what he could and you were fortunate beyond that. Maybe the thought was, well, better she do what she should wait for than burn.
If I fritter away that time with my fertility folded up in a napkin and buried away, so I can be homogenized like the rest of the world
Emotional justifications and slight to sustain what reason won't isn't a sign of reason or maturity, young lady. Instead, be happy that it worked for you but recognize it's mostly a demonstrably bad idea for most people.