I saw a poll going around about "Do you think it's a good idea for 18 year olds to get married, yes or no, no nuance" and idk I have some thoughts about that lately. (creating my own post because I don't want to bother the op, no one bother the op)
Do I personally think it's a good idea for 18yr olds to get married? No. I think at that age you're pretty young to get married and your choice in partner is not likely to be great. Maybe you only just met your spouse (and thus don't know them that well). Maybe you were high school sweethearts and while you know what your spouse is like while they're going through those years, you don't know what they're going to be like after college or after joining the workforce, and those years can be crazy formative. Maybe, though I hope not, you're marrying someone that your parents picked out for you or otherwise arranged, in which case there's a lot wrong (and you should have protections from familial abuse).
However. I also don't think that there should be any restrictions on 18yr olds getting married. At 18 you are a legal adult (in the majority of countries) and thus you have the right to make even the stupidest of decisions about what happens to you and your body. You can get regrettable tattoos. You can wreck your lungs smoking. You can go into debt buying the world's most expensive car. You should be able to chose to marry your dumb high school sweetheart and you should also be able to chose to divorce them a year later.
I feel as though there's this growing sentiment of "well sure this person is technically an adult, but they're still *young* so they should be protected from making bad choices" and that's. Hm. Young or mentally young or emotionally mature is something that people seem to have a difficult time defining on a level that can actually be logistically enforced or implemented. And we see these days what can happen when people *do* try to implement "but you're so yooooung (and dumb)" policies like what's happening with trans people where "legal adult" is still too young to transition so maybe 25 is the new limit at which you can transition but blah-blah debunked science about brain development so maybe the new limit should be 30 - " etc etc.
At 18, as a legal adult, you should have the freedom to make the decision to get married. You should have the freedom to make any dumb, regrettable, poorly thought out decision that you want, and you should have the freedom of an adult to either reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of your decisions. That's life, baby. Your hand cannot and should not be held forever until some arbitrary time at which some random person thinks you're "old enough". We have an obligation to respect people's rights to make choices that we think are bad. We have an obligation to respect people's rights to do things that they can't take back because we think a hypothetical future version of them could regret it.
We have an obligation to treat adults as adults.
Further to the above, the current push towards infantilization is increasingly aided by a tendency to functionally define adulthood as old enough not to make [specific] mistakes, whatever that means in context. This is because, particularly when it comes to sex, bodily autonomy and relationships, an alarming number of people have foundationally misunderstood the concept of consent, in the sense of thinking that informed consent either is or should be proof against regret. Under this system, if someone regrets a particular adult choice, then it must be because they weren't sufficiently informed and thus weren't really able to consent to it in the first place, and not because - as is actually the case - consent doesn't prevent bad decisions. Which is, for some, a disquieting thing to acknowledge, because the burden of autonomy means being responsible for your actions and their consequences, both good and bad. Self-infantilization thus becomes an attempt to sidestep that burden, arguing that, even if the person in question is legally an adult, they're not really an adult, and as such shouldn't be held to adult standards of responsibility, because their brain isn't fully developed yet or they're minor-coded or some other made-up bullshit. Which is not to say that nobody in this age bracket can ever be manipulated or lied to or taken advantage of; that can absolutely happen. But what I'm specifically referring to here is the belief that, if you just put off attempting adult responsibilities for long enough, you'll magically wake up one day and just know how to choose the right things, without ever having to go through a phase of regretting your own, clearly made choices. What makes this even more bizarre is the fact that childhood is defined by change and learning. You might not be expected to take personal responsibility for yourself and your feelings in quite the same way as an adult is, and you definitely know less about the world, but you're still absolutely expected to exhibit growth. Which means that this specific vein of self-infantilization is also, in a very real way, premised on the false idea of teenagers and young adults as an exceptional and unnaturally static human category: one in which you're old enough to be exempted from expectations of childhood development, but young enough that it's wrong for others to expect autonomy from you, except in the specific ways that you choose to be autonomous - but if you make a mistake with that autonomy, then you're not responsible for it, because you're not a real adult yet. Meanwhile, the truth is simply that autonomy is something you get better at with practice, and this practice of necessity involves making and learning from mistakes, such that refusing to either make adult choices once you're of age or to hold yourself responsible for them when you do is ultimately inimical to developing into a functional, knowledgeable adult. At best, it's a troubling rejection of the fact that growth is frequently uncomfortable, valuing emotional ease over personal responsibility; and at worst, it's a way to legitimize behaving like an asshole, because you're simultaneously a legal adult who gets to do all the adult things and a precious little uwu smolbean whose bad feelings must always be the fault of other people. The point being, regret and discomfort aren't pleasant things to feel, but they're also inherent to both adulthood and emotional development, such that there's no real way to skip over them, and no age big enough to avoid them. But that hasn't stopped people from trying to find a loophole.
