I Was Married Too Young: a personal story

by DANNA MYERS HOOK

I was 18 years old, I knelt across the alter, with a lightning bolt saying “run” splitting me in half. Not that I did not, or currently do not, love my husband. It was more of a “what am I doing” lightning bolt. But, other than marriage, what else is there for a serious Mormon relationship? This was the only way for us to be together, and continue to grow as a couple.

Did it make my family happy? No. They stood outside the temple. Did it make my soon-to-be in-laws happy? No. I was not who they would have chosen for their son. Nevertheless, I knew this was what I was supposed to do. I had heard all my life, especially in the last 6 years in the Young Women’s Program, that the greatest achievement I could attain was to be a wife and mother in Zion.

I was a child with grown-up expectations. I was a child still figuring out who I was. I was a child who was trying to prove I was grown-up. I could not, at the moment I knelt at the altar, have backed out. Not with all those eyes on me. Not with so many expecting me to falter. Not, as a child, still seeking others’ approval.

There was no other option. If I loved him, there was no other way forward. All other roads had been blocked off, blocked by rules (e.g., don’t close the door, feet on the floor, don’t pray together, “you might get confused feeling the Spirit, and go too far,” etc). And then, there was the ever looming question, “Do you keep the law of chastity?”

I have a Catholic friend who met her husband when she, too, was very young. They did not feel as though they had to worry about being ostracized, if they did not wait until marriage for intimacy. And they didn’t. They choose each other. So, my friend went to college. She was not stressed about paying bills, or church callings, or wondering if she was sinning by not starting a family right away, or having a food storage (remember the tale of a newly married couple accidentally meeting President Hinckley in the elevator and his piece of advice was to take the money they planned to use for a honeymoon and buy a year’s supply?).

She was a kid, going to school, with a boyfriend. She did marry, and earned a PhD, and had beautiful children, and is now a professor. I stopped going to school after we married, because we could not afford for us both to go and, of course, it is more important for the husband—the provider—to get his degree. Besides, mine would only be in case my husband died, right?

Twenty years later, I still don’t have a degree. Because I was a child who was married, pretending to be an adult, instead of laying the ground work for adulthood.

This is the next piece in a series of articles that discusses child brides in historic and modern times in Utah. The articles will be published over the next five weeks. Read the other pieces here,here,here, and here.