Marrying young fell out of favor. Some couples believe it gave them a career advantage.

When Durelle Bailey wanted to get married at 22, he faced some skepticism from his friends and family.

There was the concern that the couple didn’t know each other well enough yet.

They’d met via Instagram in 2013, when they were both 19, and had mostly been long-distance throughout the relationship, living together in Tucson, Arizona, only for the last six months before marriage. “‘Are you sure?

Do you want to give up your 20s right now?'” Bailey, 31, recalls hearing.

His wife, Samantha Bailey, 31, remembers one person telling them: “Getting married at 22 is leaving the party at 8 p.m.; It hasn’t even started yet!” Instead of spending their 20s having fun as singles, their early married life was scrappy: Durelle was one year into the Air Force as an airman, stationed in Tucson, and earning around $40,000.

Samantha was initially able to secure an unpaid position at the Better Business Bureau in Tucson, but, due to being a Canadian citizen, could not start working as a paid contractor until she got her green card in December 2016.

Still, they weren’t worried about legally joining their lives. “We both had a one-track mind that we just wanted to be together,” Samantha said.

Almost a decade later, the couple routinely saves six figures a year, owns two homes, travels abroad multiple times a year, and shares financial tips on social media.

Married couples already have significantly higher net worths than single households of people under 35 — up to 13.8 times more than unmarried women and 4.3 times more than unmarried men.

The Baileys believe that getting married young gave them more of a leg up: it forced them to sit down and map out their professional goals in their early 20s, setting them up for success.

While marrying young has gone out of style over the years, due in part to the exorbitant financial risk of divorce, some couples see it as an investment worth making, including for their biggest career ambitions.

In the 1950s, marrying young — around 20 for women and 22 for men — was the norm, according to the Census Bureau.

By today’s standards, it’d be very young, and well below the average, now closer to 28 for women and 31 for men.

Part of that has to do with how our standards around marriage have morphed.

There’s the “cornerstone” marriage model familiar to our grandparents: marrying in your early 20s and navigating adulthood together.

Recently, however, marriage has become something you do when you already have your ducks in a row: the “capstone” marriage model. “Young adults want to make sure that they’re financially stable and that they have a good sense of the earning potential of their partners before they get married,” Dr.

Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins professor who studies the sociology of the family and coined both marriage model terms, told Business Insider.

The shift began in the middle of the 20th century.

Stephanie Coontz, the author of “For Better and Worse — The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage,” said that young marriage began to have a bad reputation in the 1950s.

Women felt beholden to a marital timeline, often sacrificing their own ambitions straight after college to support their husbands’. “You ended up with a lot of women who had given up the possibility of a career and were not happy with it,” Coontz, who’s also an emeritus faculty member in history and family studies at The Evergreen State College, told Business Insider.

While marrying young has other advantages, some couples say it helped them to get set up professionally.

Early on, Durelle and Samantha Bailey held regular meetings about their professional and financial goals, structured like traditional business meetings.

Those meetings eventually evolved into successful content creation businesses and a marketing agency, where they also share financial planning tips for couples. “It’s much easier to grow in all areas of your life when you have somebody to do that with, especially if you start young,” Durelle said, “Your finances, your communication, your ability to work together as a team.

There’s a certain level of trust that you have with somebody when you grow up together.” Nick Davidov and Marina Davidova, who are managing partners of their own VC firm in San Francisco, said building a healthy marriage — through vulnerability, accountability, and flexibility — taught them valuable entrepreneurial skills.

The couple, who first met in college in Moscow, got married at 20 and had their first child at 22 — something their own parents did, too.

Davidov worked full-time in the tech space, while Davidova was a stay-at-home mom who took on some flexible roles at Nick’s companies.

It was when they moved to the Bay Area in 2014 that they experienced their first culture shock: The people around them got married and started families much later than they did. “Most of the people we became friends with through our daughter’s school are at least 15 years older than us,” Davidov, 38, told Business Insider.

At the same time, they felt that starting a life together young gave them a competitive edge.

They learned how they could complement each other as both cofounders and partners.

Davidov knew he could count on Davidova to support ventures even when he felt they were too risky.

When they first moved to California, he was working four tech jobs to make ends meet and felt miserable.

He was most interested in one opportunity: MSQRD, a filter app, which was not yet lucrative.

He wanted to devote all his time to growing this one venture, but was terrified of failure.

Davidova told him to pursue it, that they could just move back if things didn’t work out. “I was like, how can I come back defeated?” Davidov said. “But the way she said it made me reflect that I was working on things that were not bringing me any joy, and that’s why a lot of things were not progressing.” He took on the project and later sold the company to Meta. “I cannot imagine how I would figure things out, build a career, understand myself, what I like, what I’m good at, what I’m bad at, without Marina,” he said.

Delaying marriage has obvious advantages.

People have more time to establish careers, figure out what they want in a partnership, and potentially avoid expensive divorces.

Still, it’s increasingly more expensive to remain solo, too.

The cost of rents, mortgages, utilities, healthcare, student loans, and living expenses is ballooning amid rising inflation.

These days, it’s hard to shoulder that with one income instead of two.

Being in a partnership can also allow for more flexibility in lifestyle choices, especially if you’re young.

While the Baileys originally started their lives together in Tucson, their careers have since left Samantha room to pursue her passions.

They said their marketing business has been so lucrative that Samantha recently retired early from her corporate job as a recruitment marketing manager to start developing an apparel line.

When still living in Russia early in their marriage, Davidova turned down job offers. “I didn’t feel that I could be a good full-time mom and a good full-time worker at the same time,” she said. “I was too young to fight these stereotypes.” Still, after the couple moved to the US, she was inspired by American parents, who she saw dividing work and childcare more evenly. “When we had our second kid, I started working from day one,” she said.

Even still, a young marriage does not guarantee security.

It’s possible to marry someone who puts your joint finances at risk, for example.

Plus, even today, heterosexual couples tend to prioritize the man’s career in the event the couple has to relocate for one job or choose who will stay home with the kids, Coontz said.

That’s why it’s important for young newlyweds to enshrine space for both of them to achieve their personal and professional goals, Coontz added. “If they haven’t decided in advance that he will make it up to her, that’s a big sign of problems later in the marriage or unhappiness and regret on the woman,” Coontz said.

She added that for couples who can adapt to more evenly divided lifestyles, “their love grows over time.” Despite popular belief, the jury is out on whether marrying young increases the likelihood of divorce.

One 2023 study from the London School of Economics, which analyzed divorce data from China and compared it with previous US studies, found that other factors — such as the impulse to marry quickly — could have a greater impact on marital dissolution than simply putting a ring on it earlier.

While getting married older can seem like the safest financial bet, Cherlin pointed out one big downside: it’s still a bet. “If you wait until all your ducks are lined up, you may never find them lined up,” Cherlin said. “If you’re trying so hard to make sure that a marriage works, you may lose relationships that would’ve worked.” Coontz doesn’t believe in shaming people for when they marry.

Instead, she said couples might do well to live together first — a choice that was far less accepted in the 1950s — and ask themselves deeper questions before uniting their lives. “Everybody has to weigh these decisions on the basis of their own unique needs, wants, resources, and level of trust in a potential partner,” she said.

Both the Baileys and Davidov and Davidova entered the marriage with the expectation of growing together under a shared foundation, which relieved the pressure to have everything already figured out, financially or otherwise.

For example, Samantha’s parents helped furnish their home and “fill in the gaps” with things they couldn’t afford.

Davidov and Davidova’s parents helped with babysitting so they could both work.

For these couples, knowing the alternative could be years of enduring judgments on dating apps, marrying earlier felt less like a perilous leap.

Starting a life with someone who would steadfastly grow beside them felt more like a soft place to land.

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