Abstract
Age at marriage has for decades been the strongest and most unequivocal predictor of marital failure. The likelihood of divorce nears eighty percent for those who marry in mid-adolescence, then drops steadily. Delaying marriage until the mid-twenties reduces one’s likelihood of divorce to thirty percent. Women who marry at age twenty-one or younger, moreover – and one in ten U.S. women do – experience worse mental and physical health, attain less education, and earn lower wages than those who marry later. Post-divorce, they and their children tend to endure even greater economic deprivation and instability than do never-married mothers, who will frequently have invested more in market work and education.
While the social cost of early marriage is significant, U.S. policy disregards the hundreds of thousands of young people currently married or divorced, as well as those who may be contemplating early marriage. A comprehensive analysis of early marriage and its regulation is overdue, and this Article undertakes that task.
The Article argues that a historic confluence of cultural and structural changes has simultaneously transformed the social function and meaning of modern marriage and prolonged the course of development to adulthood. It advances a new conception of “marital capacity” to supplant the current legal concept of consent, which is inadequate in the context of marriage. This new conception recognizes adolescents’ and emerging adults’ cognitive abilities to understand and voluntarily consent to marriage, but also accounts for their psychosocial immaturity and incomplete acquisition of other abilities required to sustain modern marriage.
The median age at first marriage is rising, reflecting gradual social adaptation to these cultural and structural changes. Legal adaptation, however, has lagged. Even though law is only one of the structural influences on family formation, legal change bringing the marital age in line with the modern social institution will go far to alleviate the strain on individuals and cost to society imposed by early marriage.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2012
Publication Information
92 Boston University Law Review 1817-1863 (2012)
Repository Citation
Hamilton, Vivian E., "The Age of Marital Capacity: Reconsidering Civil Recognition of Adolescent Marriage" (2012). Faculty Publications. 1430.
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/1430