We Have To Stop Making Young Mormons The Butt of Our Trauma Jokes

Have you seen this TikTok? It’s not extraordinary; a million identical videos are circulating online, each as unoriginal as the last. 

Roll camera: Hahahahaha those Mormon kids. Can you imagine getting being so young and getting married after only six months?! What FOOLS. hahahahaha. /SCENE

It’s time somebody reminded the Progressive LDS community that this trope is condescending, naive, and classist, and it does nothing to prevent young people from making imprudent marriages.

photo: courtesy of the author

Of course, the joke is that quick marriages are at least correlated and probably caused by horny people who don’t believe in pre-marital sex. This flies in the face of mountains of data showing that abstinence-only education does not prevent sex. And who could deny that church curriculum and culture are unreservedly, undoubtedly, and unambiguously abstinence-only?

You know what is actually correlated with and caused by being horny? Having sex. Which happens. All the time.

Even so, touch and affection are basic human needs. Two years into a pandemic we should know this viscerally. Mental health for young people crashed dangerously in the early days of lockdown. It is literally not good for any of us to be alone.

The joke is not merely unkind; it perpetuates the myth that chastity is both sustainable and healthy for most humans. It is not.

So why do young Mormons get married so fast, if it isn’t primarily for sex?

Sometimes it’s for guilt; they marry the person they had sexual contact with. And let none of us forget that marriage is historically and primarily an economic proposition. For many young LDS couples, it remains one.

Plenty of young people of marriageable age come from large families that cannot or will not help financially; and these kids have been soaking in rugged individualism like amniotic fluid. They are often poor, and the vulnerable ones are unlikely to seek for much assistance.

Getting married in the United States serves as a way to delineate who is financially dependant on their parents. It’s a highly unreliable measure of financial independence, but it gives young people access to pell grants (which go a long way when you are going to a heavily subsidized church school). Having a baby gives you long-term access to food benefits like SNAP and WIC. 

So what do you do when you are 21 and rent and tuition are abhorrently, prohibitively expensive? When you are not eligible for any of the paltry assistance you might be eligible for if you were older? When you are bone-crushingly lonely and need some semblance of stability?

If you live in secular Western society, you move in with your partner of six months and nobody bats an eye. Maybe your parents help you out. But this option isn’t available to young LDS people, and they are drowning in stories that say it is not only okay but imperative to marry as quickly as you find a suitable person. And then their theology, social training, and biology all compel them to start having babies, often before healthy partnership patterns have been examined or established.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said that most women marry their glass ceilings. This is a feminist issue.

Young people are vulnerable and making life-altering decisions based on immediate economic need, loneliness, and a wealth of incomplete love stories. I’m done laughing at vulnerable people. This social reality doesn’t only encourage hasty marriages, it traps women into unpaid care work from a very early age. We should all take that a lot more seriously.