Early Marriage?

I like Mondays because I get to go to this Boeing Intern events at Boeing Field and then mosey in on to work around 12, work for a few hours and then come home. We were scheduled to hear someone from Connexion by Boeing talk, but instead we had some people from Product Development. If you’ve been following the news lately, you no doubt notice that it has been rumored that Boeing was going to kill off Connexion. It now appears that Boeing is in fact shutting down Connexion. I digress.

I ended up talking to another intern today who I’d never met before (there are quite a few hundred of us, so that happens a lot). There’s a typical initial volley of information to determine who you are, where you’re from, what school you go to, what your major is, and where you’re working and what you’re doing. At the time, the class was doing an intern networking event. The goal was to sit with similar majors (which I completely failed at, sitting with a group of mechanical engineers) and discuss various things (You know you work at Boeing when…“you try to LEAN out your own life”). This intern, who I’ll call John, goes to BYU and is a Mech E. Halfway through our conversation, a female intern, who I’ll call Jane, walks over behind him and gives him a kiss. I assume they’re dating and was surprised about how quickly the two interns got together (my rational being that most interns are from out of state and that it was highly unlikely that a college couple would intern at the same company away from home).

Then John introduces Jane as his wife, and the BYU thing clicks, and it all makes sense now. I didn’t ask, but I doubt that John or Jane are over 22 years old, which is not entirely surprising as I heard about two people at Mines (yes, Colorado School of Mines) who were married last year. If I recall correctly, the guy had just come back from his mission trip and was 23 or so. He ended up marrying a freshman.

Now the question, why do I hear about so many Mormons getting married so young? I assume that it’s traditional, but I don’t know for sure. However, I’m more curious about about the effect of being married so young. It seems atypical for people with a higher social-economic status to marry at such a young age and I wonder how their marriages compare to those of people who get married later in life. Are the divorce rates any different? What about change in social-economic status, does it go up or down? What else deviates substantially from the norm?

[tags]boeing internship, boeing intern, boeing, intern, internship, connexion by boeing, byu, marriage, mormon[/tags]