Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, recently told graduates of a Christian college to get married young. And the New York Times lost its mind.
Jessica Grose, a “family, religion, education, and culture” opinion writer for the New York Times, watched Kirk’s commencement speech to Hillsdale College this May, and she did not like what she heard.
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Reflecting on her late husband’s memory and legacy, Erika Kirk reminded the audience of Charlie’s admonition to, “Get married. Have children. Build a legacy. Pass down your values. Pursue the eternal. Seek true joy.” She even tweaked it a little, advising the Hillsdale grads to “get married young, not rushed, but young.”
But even this modest change wasn’t good enough to escape Grose’s ire. Under the headline, “The Gap Between the Families We Have and the Ones Conservatives Want,” Gross accuses Kirk of wanting Americans “to get married in one’s late teens or early 20s” and return to a “unwanted … patriarchal, midcentury Christian idea of marriage.”
“Kirk pitches her message as countercultural and in a sense it is,” Grose continues. “But a young marriage isn’t what most Americans want. Only 10% of Americans in a survey said that getting married at 20 to 24 years old was ideal and most people believe it’s better to wait until you’re more established and responsible.”
And it is true. The Pew poll Grose links to does show that only 9% of Americans chose the ages of 20 to 24 as the ideal time to get married. But that same poll also found that the average age chosen for the ideal age to get married was 26.5. That is just 2.5 years off from 24!
More importantly, what Grose does not mention is that the average age of first marriage in America has been steadily rising. In 1950, the average age at first marriage was 20.3 for women and 22.8 for men. By 2000, that had risen to 25.1 for women and 26.8 for men. Not too far off from everyone’s ideal.
But then the average age at first marriage just kept rising. Today, the average woman waits until she is 28.6 years old to get married, and the average man is 30.2 years old. That means the average woman is missing over two years of ideal married life, and the average man is missing almost four full years.
It seems the real gap isn’t between the families conservatives want and the families Americans actually have, but between the families most Americans want and the families they are able to achieve.
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Nor is marriage the only area where American life is failing to match American aspirations. There is also a persistent fertility gap as well. Americans still say the ideal family has about 2.7 children, according to Gallup, even as the actual U.S. total fertility rate has fallen to roughly 1.6 births per woman. Again, the problem isn’t that conservatives are pushing Americans into larger families they don’t want. The problem is that modern American life isn’t enabling them to build the families they already desire.
Charlie Kirk’s advice was never to marry recklessly. It was to stop treating marriage as something that should always be postponed until every career milestone is checked off, every debt is paid, and every uncertainty disappears. Life doesn’t work that way. If you wait until everything is perfect, you may wait forever. So, ignore the people who tell you marriage is something to put off indefinitely. Find someone worthy. Make sure it’s the right person. Then get married young … not rushed, but young.
