Part of the beauty of marriage is that it involves a second person coming alongside to help, strengthen, encourage, support, and care for you. More years of such blessings may prove a greater benefit than fewer years. This is perhaps especially true when those blessings come in your formative twenties.

There are a few trends that seem universally associated with a modernizing society. Wealth increases, for example, and standards of living rise. Meanwhile, marriage and fertility rates decline. So too does the average age of marriage. Over the past few decades, marriage in many Western countries has transformed from a rite-of-passage into adulthood to something more like an optional add-on to middle-age.

Contra the culture both within and outside of the church, I remain an advocate of marrying young. That’s not to say that there is anything wrong with waiting to marry until you are older or that you should marry young. However, I do I suggest you at least be open to the possibility of it. It’s not to say you should plow recklessly ahead with your first crush, but that you should move forward only with the guidance and wisdom of parents and Christian community. And it’s definitely not to say you should marry when you are still a child—so perhaps we can define “young” as being something like twentyish to twenty-sixish—ages that are within the bounds of adulthood but still significantly younger than the contemporary average.

With that in mind, I direct this brief article to Christian young people and offer them several reasons they should be open to marrying when they are young.

There is something sweet and significant about building a life together. While there is nothing wrong with building separate lives and then combining them in your late twenties or thirties, it is a special joy to begin with nothing and build it all as a couple.

While the Bible offers no explicit directives on the age of marriage, it does at times seem to assume or commend it as an aspect of being younger rather than older. For example: “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth” (Proverbs 5:18). Sure, part of this may be related to the realities of an ancient agrarian culture, but still, the Bible’s assumption for marriage generally seems to point to youth more than age.

Once you are certain that you have found the person you would like to marry, there is often little benefit in remaining unmarried for a long period of time. Conversely, there may be difficult struggles and temptations.

It is powerfully counter-cultural to not only reject cohabitation, but to embrace marriage. Everyone expects you will get married someday, but few expect you will get married until you have tried many partners and trialed many relationships. Young marriage testifies to God’s plan for men and women to form exclusive and lifelong partnerships—to not only choose to build a life with another person but to forever reject all other possibilities by deliberately closing out your options. Such a decision is guaranteed to provoke interesting and biblically-based conversations.

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