Introduction | Keeping the faith | Breaking a lease beats breaking a marriage contract | Going against the grain

Liz Sell stepped onto the pedestal in front of a mirror, tears filled her eyes and a wide grin covered her face. Her mother, maid of honor and a bridesmaid each sported matching smiles.

After hours of trying on dress after dress she finally found it: strapless, stark white, with pearl and rhinestone beaded detail around the waist. It had a train – not too long, but long enough to need a bustle to take up some fabric for the reception.

Sell, a senior from Pretty Prairie, never thought she would marry at 22. Twenty-four, maybe. Twenty-five was more like it. But her mother wed at 19 and her grandmother at 17.

“You know you look great in this dress. If this is what you want, then this is what you want,” Liz’s mom, Janice Sell, said, trying to remain unbiased.

They purchased the dress for $900, much more than they had planned on spending, and it was whisked away for alterations.

That experience was the moment it all began to sink in.

In 10 months from that moment, Sell would be getting married to her boyfriend of four and a half years on May 30, after she graduates from the University of Kansas.

Fewer Americans are married now than 50 years ago, and the number has been consistently falling. Though the national median age for marriage is steadily increasing, some students are still choosing to go to the altar at an age younger than the current median of 28 for men and 26 for women.

* * *

Shirley Hill, professor of sociology, said that the current trend of waiting to get married at an older age stems from a gender revolution.

“In the past 30 or 40 years as women entered the labor market, they began to demand a different type of marriage relationship, one not only based on fulfillment but based on equality,” Hill said.

Women aren’t looking for traditional marriages of a working husband and a housewife anymore and neither are men, Hill said. Hill also said the gender revolution was responsible for the shift because it made women less dependent on marriage for economic stability and less willing to tolerate marriages that weren’t based on equality.

“It’s taking couples a longer period of time to get what they consider the economic foothold they need to get married,” Hill said. “Increasingly ,people are having to go to college, get additional training before they feel like they have some economic resources to get married.”

Women now make up about 53 percent of college graduates, according to Pew ResearchCenter, and as a result, men experience more economic gain from marriage now than they have in past decades. In Kansas, the median age for women to marry is 25. The lowest is 24 in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Idaho and Utah. Studies also show that states where women get married younger tend to have a higher divorce rate.

So why are couples such as Sell and her fiancé, Justin Epp, planning to walk down the aisle shortly after walking down the hill?

For Tiffany Brant and Matt Basgall, moving in together before marrying made them realize they didn’t want to be with each other anymore.

Laura Schmidt and David Friedberg choose not to live together before getting married and say their religion will help guide their marriage.

Whitney and Nick Janzen-Pankratz find financial benefits from getting hitched before they’re out of college.

Together they buck the current trend of waiting until their late 20s to wed.

Money matters

In 2007, Sell and Epp, a senior from Pretty Prairie, lived in separate apartments in the same complex. They would take turns spending the night in each other’s apartments for a year until they eventually decided it was a waste of money. In August 2008, Sell and Epp moved in together, despite Epp’s grandmother’s uneasy feelings. The move cut down on housing and utility costs for the couple.

A month later, without telling Sell, Epp bought a $1,300 engagement ring. It wouldn’t be until Christmas that he would propose, by putting the ring in a box that was inside a bigger box, and so on all the way up to a very large box.

More than a year later, Sell and Epp have now saved about $1,000 to contribute to their parents’ funds for the wedding. The rest of Epp and Sell’s saving efforts are going to pay for their five-night stay at Walt Disney World for their honeymoon. But during the last few months, Sell’s schedule has been jam-packed preparing for the wedding.

Finalize the reception menu. Check.

Find bridesmaids dresses. Check.

Decide on party favors and center pieces. Check.

Complete homework. Check.

Janice, her mother, admits she’s worried about her daughter’s stress level.

“I think the timing is a little bit rough because he’s trying to find a job and she’s got another year to get her teaching certificate,” Janice said. “I’m afraid she’s going to turn into a bridezilla.”

Sell said having a year and a half to plan the wedding had helped reduce her stress level.

“I tried to make sure I had time for myself and to relax and not let everything get to me.”

* * *

Moving in with one another may have lessened the bills for Sell and Epp, but for Whitney Janzen-Pankratz, a senior from Hesston, that was only the beginning of the benefits she saw.

Whitney married her husband, Nick, almost two years ago, when she was 20 and he was 22. Though they did not live together before marriage, Whitney said one of the biggest benefits of being married and in school was the increase in financial aid available to her. Now that she is married, her parents no longer claim her as a dependent so her financial aid is based solely onher own income. Before they were married, Whitney worked two jobs and was nearly self-sufficient.

“My stress level reduced when we got married because he was able to help with the finances,” she said.

Although Whitney and Nick support themselves, their parents still help out by paying for their cell phone bills.

“Their logic is if we ever did need help, they didn’t want our cell phone bill to be one of the things that got cut off,” Whitney said. “There are certain little things that they kind of keep an eye on.”

In order to ensure they wouldn’t have money problems, the couple made a budget. Whitney said their parents encouraged them to do so because they, too, were married at a young age and understood the potential difficulties.

Married couples such as Whitney and Nick tend to have a higher household net income than unmarried people, according to Pew, which could motivate some to walk down the aisle. Statistics show that the youngest median age at marriage comes from the “Bible belt” of the nation — states such as Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Introduction | Keeping the faith | Breaking a lease beats breaking a marriage contract | Going against the grain

— Edited by Melissa Johnson