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Newsweek Home » Education » Current Magazine
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State of the Student Union

Some students are kissing the dating game goodbye and are embracing marriage and commitment instead. current explores why students choose to tie the knot so soon.

Recent college grads and newlyweds, Lauren Jacks Gamble and Keith Gamble
Michael Darter
Recent college grads and newlyweds, Lauren Jacks Gamble and Keith Gamble
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EDITORS' ROUNDTABLE
CURRENT MAGAZINE
By Chrissy A. Balz
Georgetown
Updated: 8:39 p.m. ET Aug. 26, 2005

Fall 2005 issue - While most seniors at Harvard were fussing with their caps and gowns, Lauren Jacks Gamble was busy thinking about her wedding dress. As if the stress of finals and emotion of commencement wasn’t enough, she and her fiancé, Keith Gamble, had chosen graduation weekend for their wedding date. The combination could have been a nightmare, had the couple not decided to do things their way.

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“I didn’t want to do the whole production” Jacks Gamble said, “Sometimes it seems
so commodified... We could celebrate our love without everything being color-coordinated.”
So there they were, nothing borrowed, nothing blue, simply a sundress, a few
close friends and the tree-lined courtyard in Kirkland, the residential house where the
couple first met.

Like most things on a college campus, marriage has been molded to fit modernity. Romantic interaction among today’s students reflects a growing trepidation about traditional relationship patterns; dating has given way to hooking up and, for many, serious commitment has been replaced by casual sex. The characteristics that mark our generation — career-centric lifestyles, lack of relationship models and re-negotiated gender roles — are driving college students from the arms of commitment into the loins of lust.

Where our grandparents once knew the security of young married life, many students today experience only the ups and downs of our infamous hook-up culture. Fifty years ago, most students were married to the person they would spend their lives with by graduation. Judging by today’s average marriage length (7.8 years), it’s unlikely that current college students have found a partner to spend even a decade with. With illusions of sepia-toned romance fading into the red tape of divorce proceedings, undergrads aren’t exactly sprinting toward the altar.

For decades the institution of marriage has been declining among young people: the US Census Bureau has reported a steady increase in the age of marriage since 1950. In 2001, the last
reported year, the median age indicated was 27 for males, 25 for females. What’s more, Americans are getting married later and not staying married longer. Statistics for the college-aged cohort are particularly discouraging: in 2001, only 14 percent of males who married between the ages of 20 and 24 reported that their union remains intact. Though divorce rates are slightly lower for college-aged females — almost 23 percent of women married in
the same age bracket remained so — things don’t look good.

Even those hopeless romantics who do manage to tie the knot today must face their own set of challenges. These often start with the censure of their peers. Collegiate brides and grooms have to battle the popular conception that they are somehow a world apart from their unmarried peers. Classmates assume that young newly weds don’t participate in college life the way single students do — they don’t have as much fun, they don’t have as many friends and they certainly don’t have the same adventures. In other words, there’s no time to be young and fabulous. “Being married in college is kind of the polar opposite of the typical
college experience,” Kelly Pressler, a senior at Siena College, says. “It’s a unique time in life — so much of it is about getting to know yourself and your friends. Marriage takes it to a different level entirely.”

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