We Have To Stop Making Young Mormons The Butt of Our Trauma Jokes
Have you seen this TikTok? It’s not extraordinary; a million identical videos are circulating online, each as unoriginal as the last.
Roll camera: Hahahahaha those Mormon kids. Can you imagine getting being so young and getting married after only six months?! What FOOLS. hahahahaha. /SCENE
It’s time somebody reminded the Progressive LDS community that this trope is condescending, naive, and classist, and it does nothing to prevent young people from making imprudent marriages.
Of course, the joke is that quick marriages are at least correlated and probably caused by horny people who don’t believe in pre-marital sex. This flies in the face of mountains of data showing that abstinence-only education does not prevent sex. And who could deny that church curriculum and culture are unreservedly, undoubtedly, and unambiguously abstinence-only?
You know what is actually correlated with and caused by being horny? Having sex. Which happens. All the time.
Even so, touch and affection are basic human needs. Two years into a pandemic we should know this viscerally. Mental health for young people crashed dangerously in the early days of lockdown. It is literally not good for any of us to be alone.
The joke is not merely unkind; it perpetuates the myth that chastity is both sustainable and healthy for most humans. It is not.
So why do young Mormons get married so fast, if it isn’t primarily for sex?
Sometimes it’s for guilt; they marry the person they had sexual contact with. And let none of us forget that marriage is historically and primarily an economic proposition. For many young LDS couples, it remains one.
Plenty of young people of marriageable age come from large families that cannot or will not help financially; and these kids have been soaking in rugged individualism like amniotic fluid. They are often poor, and the vulnerable ones are unlikely to seek for much assistance.
Getting married in the United States serves as a way to delineate who is financially dependant on their parents. It’s a highly unreliable measure of financial independence, but it gives young people access to pell grants (which go a long way when you are going to a heavily subsidized church school). Having a baby gives you long-term access to food benefits like SNAP and WIC.
So what do you do when you are 21 and rent and tuition are abhorrently, prohibitively expensive? When you are not eligible for any of the paltry assistance you might be eligible for if you were older? When you are bone-crushingly lonely and need some semblance of stability?
If you live in secular Western society, you move in with your partner of six months and nobody bats an eye. Maybe your parents help you out. But this option isn’t available to young LDS people, and they are drowning in stories that say it is not only okay but imperative to marry as quickly as you find a suitable person. And then their theology, social training, and biology all compel them to start having babies, often before healthy partnership patterns have been examined or established.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said that most women marry their glass ceilings. This is a feminist issue.
Young people are vulnerable and making life-altering decisions based on immediate economic need, loneliness, and a wealth of incomplete love stories. I’m done laughing at vulnerable people. This social reality doesn’t only encourage hasty marriages, it traps women into unpaid care work from a very early age. We should all take that a lot more seriously.
Wow. This is such an important framing of this issue. The economic and class reasons for marrying young among young LDS people is so rarely touched on. And culturally it seems like we lack a meaningful understanding of how marriage is still an economic proposition and only deeply consider the issue when it comes to divorce after many years of marriage. Thank you for this.
Yes!! you get it. I only recently shifted my thinking on this, but it felt really important and it’s validating to see you agree.
Wow, what powerful advocacy. I really appreciate this piece.
Another related topic is the way paying the church vis regular tithing payments is a non negotiable commandment where failure to make regular payments to the church results in a loss of one’s family in the afterlife. In my experience. This commandment has had an enormous impact on Mormon families’ ability to help their children while also limiting the independence of young adults attempting to launch.
My wife and I made a decision to stop paying tithing and to use that money to help our married children. We have made down payments on homes, and paid off credit card bills. Our TBM children would be mortified if they knew this help was coming from “tithing”!
Thank you for bringing in points I hadn’t considered re: economics.
To me, part of the nuanced conversation has to be about shattering the glass ceiling of your spouse. How can we reshape our society in such a way that marrying young or having children young doesn’t mean women stop their education or stop their career goals? We don’t need to mock young Mormons not only because it ignores the pressures on these people, but also because part of honoring freedom to choose means respecting that marrying young or quickly might actually be a genuinely good decision for those individuals. It only becomes a bad thing for women (assuming they chose a good fellow) because we’ve set these young women up to take low paying jobs to support husbands through school and then to leave the workforce and have no quality way of reentering it, and few good part time jobs. It becomes a trap and a dead end, but it doesn’t need to.
Anyway. I think you make some really good points that I appreciate. I just also want to put in a vote for maybe these adults (albeit young and under pressure) are also making a good choice for themselves. That settling into responsible adulthood is a good thing if that is what the people want to do.
I have seen this trend in making fun of missionaries–we are talking about teenagers here–instead of addressing our complaints about the church to the policymakers who actually drive policy and culture.
Re: Pell grants/financial aid
When I went to the financial aid office as a single female student at BYU, the financial counselor I met with kept insisting that getting married was the way to get better aid. He could not or would not give me any other advice.
I did not stay at BYU for very long and finished my BA elsewhere.
I know that this article did not describe was my experience, but have listened enough to other people to know that it is and experience of others. While I married young, and had children young, my family (meaning the larger extended family) was my life line. They rallied around me and other family members and continue to do so today. (My parents, and aunts have been some the of the best examples for me of what it means to tend to the family as a whole) I finished school (although it took me longer), my husband took time off school to allow me to finish, and then he did. And then my larger ward community provided me with tons of support in so many ways also. Today, I am a huge advocate for community support of the family unit, not just the mother or children, but the unit as a whole (whatever that may look like). I wonder how many younger kids just starting out would do much better with a much broader support network, even if they choose to get married and have children early(and by that, I mean real connected support that begins in local communities who reach out to each other). I currently own a small business with a few others working with us. Everyone knows that family comes first in my mind. We’ve worked hard to create flexible scheduling, very open communication, and support networks to help them and their families cope and thrive. I consider that a product of my upbringing within the church and my own family culture. I wonder if we can take the good and weed out the bad of our church culture that allows us to understand and participate fully in community building, including the whole family.