What No One Told Me Before I Got Married At 24

In my Southern home state, getting married young isn't unusual. I knew many people who got engaged before they graduated from high school (disclosure: my high school was a Catholic home-school group). By the time of my wedding — when I was 24 and my husband, Steve, was 25 — some of my friends already had children.

Still, we're younger than the average newlyweds. In 2015, the median age for first marriages in the United States was 29 for men and 27 for women. (In New York, it's even higher — the median ages for first marriages were 30.3 for men and 28.8 for women, as of 2014.) When I meet new people, they're often surprised to hear that I'm already married. It's not necessarily judgmental — but the surprise factor still makes things awkward.

While I realize that getting married in your mid-20s isn't the norm for many American women, it worked out for us. We'd known each other for years, and there didn't seem to be any point in waiting to get married later, just because of cultural norms. Some things still surprised me about being young newlyweds, though — here are a few of the things I learned.