5 Drawbacks to Marrying Your High School or College Sweetheart

I recently published an article listing 5 advantages to marrying your high school or college sweetheart. Although it has worked out well for my husband and I, there are some drawbacks as well that I wanted to discuss. So in this article, I will give 5 disadvantages to marrying your high school or college sweetheart.

#1 - If you meet your significant other when you are both very young then odds are that you will not have the opportunity to date very many other people. For some people, this can result in a lot of questions about whether or not you missed out by not dating more people just in case "something better" came along. On the one hand you don't want to break up with someone you love just so that you can see what else is out there, but on the other hand people often question whether you really know what you want if you have never experienced anything else.

#2 - Since there are many more complications that can arise from marrying before or during college, I think that it is best in most cases to do what we did and wait to get married until after graduation. However, that can be difficult when you have been dating since high school because often it means going to seperate universities and dating long distance. Even if you do both go to the same school you may have a long wait ahead before you get married and that can add strain to a relationship because after 3 or 4 years you can start to feel as if you are stuck in a rut and nothing will ever change.

#3 - Money... This is a big one. People who get married later have a chance to get settled into their careers and become more financially stable. If you get married just after college then you will be just starting out and probably have lower salaries and debts from college to pay off. This means that many times you may have to make do with renting apartments for a while and eating at home instead of going out as much, among other budgetary constraints. If you have dreams of starting off your marriage in that great house with the white picket fence and continuing your out every weekend lifestyle from college, you might quickly find that reality is much more complicated than your imaginings. If you have children soon after you get married this is amplified immensely.

#4 - You can grow apart from your friends. It is hard sometimes to maintain friendships when you are in very different places in your lives. Sometimes it can feel as though you have no common ground anymore. Without the foundation of college experiences to draw from, we found that some of our friends' conversations suddenly seemed to revolve around trips to various bars and clubs and the strange people that they met there. It is sometimes difficult to get involved in these types of conversations since you may feel as if you have nothing really to add since you have no similar experiences to share. This can also go back to the money issue because friends will often want to go places and do things that you really cannot afford and may not understand that it is not that you don't want to spend time with them, but that your priorities have shifted and you just can't afford it. I also found that with many of my friends once married I automatically became an outsider. They would share dating experiences and offer each other advice on how to handle a significant other and if I commented I would get the reply, "you wouldn't understand...you're married." It is definitely possible to still maintain great friendships after you get married, but it does cause some complications, especially when you are the first of your group of friends to make it to the altar.

#5 - In your 20s there are so many changes going on in your life already and marriage can add stress to an already stressful time. In your early 20's most people are finishing college, looking for jobs, living truly on their own for the first time and making big life decisions that will affect their whole lives. If you are in a serious relationship and planning a wedding during this time it can make things even more complicated. You have to consider not only how your decisions will impact your future, but also what effect they will have on your partner's future. Big changes can happen quickly at this time of your life and trying to adjust to married life while you are still trying to adjust to the "real world" of job and bills can sometimes prove to be just too much stress for some relationships. As my mother told us, "The way that you handle the next few years will either make or break your marriage." Considering that our first year of marriage consisted of moving halfway across the country to a town in rural NE with about 600 people for my husband's job, we probably had more stresses than many people would have to deal with. However, there will be big decisions that have to be made in any marriage and when you get married young the decisions are likely to come up fast and when you least expect it.

Although it has worked out well for my husband and I so far, there have definitely been times when these complications have made things difficult for us. I think that just like my mother implied, the difficulties have made our marriage stronger. However, I know that it could also easily have gone the other way. As I stated in my other article there are many wonderful things about getting married young and to your high school or college sweetheart, but you need to be aware of the potential difficulties as well and make sure that you are willing to deal with them before you jump in to anything.