Barbara Kay: The oddity of young love

I recently threw a holiday party for some of my colleagues in journalism, including some young up-and-comers. Among them was a couple I’ve known for some years now, who happily informed me they had moved in together to mark their relationship’s 7th anniversary.

If they were 30, that would have been neutral information, not column inspiration. But they are in their very early twenties, and their adolescent friendship turned into love when they were young teens.

Our conversation set me to thinking of the many other couples I know who met in their formative teen years and stayed the course without regrets. My older sister, for example, met her future husband at 14, and that was it. They broke up once to test their commitment, but they were both miserable and the experiment was shortly called off, never to be repeated. They married a month after she turned 19 and have celebrated over 50 happy anniversaries. I know a certain Supreme Court justice with a similar story.

Of course in those days, early marriage was not only common, it was the norm. Premarital sex was discouraged, living “in sin” was a custom practiced only by the boldest and most unconventional of young couples, and feminism was still a gathering storm; for most of us the blue skies of morality-based gender conformity smiled down on high school romance and gave protective early marriage their cultural blessing.

Many feminists frown on marriage altogether, which they consider a social construct imposed by the patriarchy to control women. But even those who approve would consider marriage to one’s first sexual partner a hopelessly retrograde notion. Feminism promotes the liberation of women’s sexuality, on a par with men’s traditional freedoms, as the sina qua non of gender equality. Indeed, in her 2012 book, The End of Men, feminist writer Hannah Rosin claims hook-up culture empowers women; emotional relationships, she says, are a distraction from women’s ambitions.

What then are we to make of my high-achieving, ambitious young friends, whose long, trusting attachment accords with their particular natures? They find their settled arrangement to be a catalyst to focused work and their mutual support empowering, the opposite in fact of a distraction from either’s goals (just as it was for my successful sister and the judge).

The question that intrigues me is: How have such couples resisted the received wisdom Rosin’s book represents? They have been continuously beating against a cultural current in “forsaking all others” all these years. In some cases, those who marry young may be conforming to their family’s religious or cultural norms. But there are still some young Canadians who choose to settle young because, for them, that simply works better. (Case in point: My young friends are not sociological outliers, but typical middle-class Canadians, neither from a religious family, who found love early and decided to stick with it.)

Please don’t take from my description of this unusual young couple any attempt at prescription. I would never have had the maturity or the emotional coherence to form such a mature attachment at their age, and I suspect I am typical of the general population. But I do find such successful young couples interesting, largely because it’s remarkable they are able even to hear, let alone heed, the beat of their own drum over our culture’s anti-boundary, pro-experimentation racket.

Human beings are psychologically diverse. It is unfair to judge as “incorrect” or abnormal a precocious inclination toward modesty, restraint and fidelity. Nobody can predict whether any match will last, but I have a good feeling about my remarkably mature and self-knowing party guests, and many others like them. I suppose it depends on your personality and cultural disposition as to whether your instinct is to feel pity for them, or to consider them the lucky ones.

National Post

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Commentary by the Ottawa Mens Centre