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My son's getting married at 22. Why the rush?
When her 22-year-old son announced he was to marry, Caroline Lavender was shocked. She and his father had lived contentedly 'in sin’ for years. How do you react when your boy, 22 and still a student, suddenly announces his plans to marry a girl he has known just three months? And – here’s the crunch – when you and his father are still “living in sin”? This is what happened to us this summer. We were on a family holiday, having lunch on the shady terrace of our hillside Greek cottage. We’d spent the morning on the beach. It was heavenly: the Mediterranean sparkling below us, the scent of jasmine wafting past on the breeze. Our sons are both silent types when it comes to mealtimes. As so often in the past, I made the request that they try to provide some conversation. The son in question did as asked. “I’ve asked Sarah to marry me,” he said with a sheepish grin. “And she’s said yes.” I nearly choked on my feta. Will was due to graduate in a couple of weeks. Hopefully a bright future awaited him, even in these uneasy times. As far as we knew this was his first serious relationship. We’d met Sarah briefly – had warmed to her, but certainly not viewed her as a potential daughter-in-law.Now, he announced, he intended to stay in the city where he’d studied while Sarah, in her second year, finished her art history degree. In the meantime he would get a job – any job would do. They were planning to marry in a year. Our immediate reaction was not to crack open a bottle of bubbly. Instead, slowly recovering from the shock, we cautiously raised all the predictable, sensible, middle-aged objections. We were so glad, we said, he had found someone he cared for. But couldn’t they just live together, at least for a few years? If things did go wrong, being married made it so much more painful, we warned. Was it wise to make such a life-altering decision, so young? But underneath all this was another, more contentious, issue. His father and I are not married and have never wanted to be. It’s ironic that, in the middle of my lecture that living together would be the sensible option, I recalled the dreadful falling out with my own parents for precisely the opposite reason – for cohabiting with a boyfriend. (My Catholic family was so conventional that I never admitted to any serious sexual relationship until the ripe old age of 34. Even then, it caused a huge rift.) In my twenties and thirties no one among my friends was married. We were the generation that rejected our parents’ rules: we were going to have free love, without the ties that bind: if and when things got serious, we’d just live together. We didn’t want the state involved in our most intimate relationships. The roots of marriage, I learnt from Marx and Engels, lay in economic arrangements, the oppression of women and the defence of property. At a personal level, my all-controlling mother was a factor in my lack of interest in marriage. It’s possible that my desperate need to escape my hysterically anti-sex mum (who told me, at the tender age of 11, never to mention the word “intercourse” and warned me in my late teens that she would rather see me “dead than pregnant”) may have affected my later attitude to any authority. The intimacy of marriage didn’t look that good from where I was standing. Peter, my partner, was brought up in the communist bloc but had a similar cultural experience. Even after I met him and then became pregnant at 38, marriage didn’t enter our minds, much to my family’s dismay. Now here was Will, turning the tables, adamant that marriage was what he wanted. At 22, our son was “engaged” – to us, a strangely alien, old-fashioned concept. There was even a ring (made of zirconia, a sort of lab-grown fake diamond). There were terrifying “wedding plans” to be made. Not only that – the bride-to-be was keen on a church affair. I am agnostic and Peter finds religious rituals excruciating. Was Will rebelling against our bohemian ideals, betraying all we stood for? There were other worries too. His father gently voiced the opinion that one’s twenties are about finding out who you are – about getting experience, travelling, having unpredictable adventures of the kind you can’t have as a couple (Will replied that he definitely wanted to travel – but not without Sarah). On a mundane, daily level, I pointed out, they had yet to know each other. Did Sarah realise how lazy he was when it came to clearing up, what a mess his room was normally, how grimy the sheets? That the only thing he could reliably cook was spag bol? (She was worse, he told us – she never cooked.) After a while we all fell silent, our lunch uneaten. Then Will described to us how her parents had reacted to the news. They’d been told the previous week – a revelation that caused me a painful stab of jealousy. Sarah’s mother, he said, had hugged him and cried. Her father had shaken his hand, man-to-man. On hearing this I was overcome with remorse. How could we have been so negative, so poker-faced? His father hastily opened a bottle of cheap retsina that was sitting in the fridge. We raised a toast to the (so far) happy couple. Fuelled by the alcohol, I was the first to cry, closely followed by Will. I asked forgiveness for not congratulating him sooner and gave him a hug. There were many other issues to be faced over the next few weeks, not least the fact that this new relationship suddenly took precedence over us, his family. Without warning, our bond with Will had changed, loosened. Peter, in particular, felt he was losing the chance of doing things together with his elder son – that those days were over. There was a sense of loss, of childhood ties being cut, of another intimacy taking priority. All as it should be of course, but still painful. I also had to ask myself – was our disapproval partly fuelled by jealousy of this passionate, budding affair? Our own relationship was, after all, a little battered and fraying at the edges after 22 years of parenthood. We certainly found it cramped our sexual style when they came to stay – for days on end – and took over our large spare room with the double bed (another tricky point of etiquette to negotiate – with our so-called bohemian history, we could hardly insist they stay in separate rooms). Worst of all, they annexed our favourite sofa in front of the TV, lying in each others’ arms, oblivious to us. Perhaps, I told myself, times have changed – perhaps the young, with the battle for sexual freedom largely won (by us), feel free to choose the conventions that we rejected. We know of other young people who are involved in similar intense commitments. Their relationships seem almost respectable, mature beyond their time, compared to my generation’s youthful liaisons. These were passionate but often fleeting; taking place stealthily in streets and parks; and when living at home, the first fumblings were carried out nervily on single beds and sofas, with an anxious ear out for the grown-ups. One thing that did occur to me was that despite claiming all the new freedoms, like many of my female peers I had a miserable time in my twenties. I was always choosing the wrong men, my relationships were a mess and the misery they entailed didn’t make me stronger, or more independent. At 22, I was incapable of an adult relationship. Yet here was Will, in love, happy as a lark and from what I could see, in a committed relationship which seemed to work. Unlike me (or his father at that age), he had chosen someone who clearly supported him and loved him back. Whether or not this relationship lasts, all that is surely positive (and also to our credit). For myself, as the months have gone by, I have gradually realised other positives too. I am glad for Will – that he has someone he is clearly so happy with. I am excited at the prospect of new connections – with his fiancé and maybe her family (they, unlike us, married young and are much more accepting). Peter remains worried that they are both “just children”. He fears that the relationship will hold back Will (and also Sarah). But then he didn’t have a great time in his twenties either. Is he projecting his own sense of loss and having missed out onto his son? I still don’t understand why it has to be marriage. Will can’t explain it but suggests, half joking, that in his own way he is being a rebel – and thus following an honourable family tradition.