Just curious. Seems to me like they are mostly taken at a young age. Is it common for SSPXers to get married in their early 20's?

Anyone looking for somebody by any chance?

There seems to be a correlation with religiosity and the age one gets married.

I went to high school with some very devout Protestants. Out of the ones I know personally, two are already married and one is engaged. To put it in perspective, I graduated 3 years ago, which makes all of them no older than 20.

So, yes, probably.

And for your other question, go within 3-4 years of your own age. It allows for people who've grown up at the same pace as you. Seek people who actually want marriage and kids and not the common-law concubinage our society has settled for.

I didn't get married until I was 40.  Having said that, both my husband and I were Novus Ordo at the time and found the True Catholic Faith after we were married.

There's such a difference in maturity and life stage between an 18-22 year old and someone 5-10 years her senior that I could never recommend it. And I'm speaking as someone in that very same age group.

18-22 year olds are not looking to settle down, anyway. It's such a transitional period of life, where most do not have permanent employment, nor a degree by which to obtain a job in a decent field. Most are still living at home, especially at 18 when people graduate high school.

You do not have everything in check during that age group, believe me.

If there is a perfect age to get hitched, it's probably between 25-30. One should give themselves time to establish their environment - move out, get a stable job, pay off student debt, etc. before they enter marriage.

Seems to me like they are mostly taken at a young age

Based on how much research?  How many mass centres have you travelled to?

If you are prepared to compromise a little in the looks department, I am sure there are a bunch of moral, upright, unmarried women in Tradland.  I can immediately think of half a dozen at the two locations I go to mass.  I have travelled the world and I can't recall ever turning up at a Trad Church and wondering why it was full of young men and had a dearth of women.

I often hear the complaint that Trad women are thin on the ground but, biologically speaking, this makes little sense to me.  Since Trads are not selectively aborting their offspring like Hindus and since there are most vocations to the priesthood than there are nuns, (I think), then there must be slightly more women than there are men.

Now sure, not every chapel has a beauty queen who is pious and humble and near faultless in her character, but why do 95% of Trad men think they deserve that?

Sure, it ain't easy.  It will take some effort.  It might require you to change a little and knock some of the more objectionable spots off your own character.  Certainly the western world today is not one of arranged marriages, but equally in my view there are a bunch of Trad women who want to get married but struggle to find a committed man who can hold down a decent job and provide for them.

Any women with her head in the right place marrying at 22 is going to realise that without using contraception she is going to probably have 6-10 children over the next 20 years.  So, naturally, she is not going to marry a person who seems unlikely to be able to provide for that.

Men who haven't found themselves or are contemplating (juggling with) a late vocation to the priesthood or find it difficult to work because their boss is a twice divorced Protestant or a gun hating liberal or a extraordinary minister of NO cookies, or who have dreams of being a "full time Catholic blogger', or who simply don't have any savings or net worth with which to offer a women like this security are being wildly optimistic to expect a woman like this to fall into their laps.

Put yourself into the woman's shoes.  Why would she take a risk like that?

What I have observed over the past 30 years is a sizeable number of Trad women marrying non-Catholic men with conservative morals who could provide for them and act as husbands, since they were not able to find a Traditionalist man whom they thought could do that.  In some cases the husband has converted.  In no case, I know of, has the non-Catholic husband left them.

My advice to you would be to ask yourself why Trad women are choosing to marry non-catholic men and 20 years later are bringing their 6 children along to mass every week with or without their husband in tow, but still married.

Clearly a non Catholic husband is not an ideal, but it is a compromise that some are willing to make.  Why?

Good posts ggreg, but keep in mind that if two people truly have the blessings of God, lack of money and resources can be turned around for spiritual benefit. Otherwise, the way of the world will sweep them away. You start out loving the things the other has in the beginning only to wind up dwelling on what they don't have and how human they really are. Without Christian charity, they'll use each other up and toss themselves out like empty wrappers.

In the end we are caretakers and guardians of the soul anyway, so like the Martins in France we should almost look at it like entering into a monastery of two.

Good posts ggreg, but keep in mind that if two people truly have the blessings of God, lack of money and resources can be turned around for spiritual benefit. Otherwise, the way of the world will sweep them away.

Once you can meet your basic needs I would agree with you.  You don't need tons of money.  I earn far more than I spend and that is the smart way for anyone to live because that way you are not under pressure and you can take time over life's big decisions.  You can also put money aside to help your children go to college and not start adult-life with a ton of debt.

However, realistically, in modern society there are unavoidable costs.  Having children costs money.  Medical care or insurance costs money.  Cars, required to get to mass, cost money.  Gasoline to power them costs money.  Internet connections cost money.  Children require some level of comfort, entertainment, feeding, education.  Diapers cost money, running a household costs money.  You don't need a foreign holiday every year but if you want your children to take and interest in and be able to engage with the wider world, then a couple of overseas trips (or travelling a few states over in North America) between the ages of 5 and 18 are required to produce rounded characters.

Now sure, you can economize, but only to a point.  Past that point you DO start missing out on opportunities, education and character forming stuff.  Stuff that differentiates you as a employment candidate from some wet-back who has just crossed the Rio Grande or hard working Romanian immigrant.

Children have talents.  Whether that is playing chess or cross-country running or stage performance.  To practice those skills builds their characters and their confidence and practising them costs MONEY.

I know a very poor family who have never taken their children to London.  They only live 90mins drive from some of the world's greatest museums and interesting historical sites yet the only time they've seen London is when I drove them.  They have a car, but they don't have the money or the inclination to travel there.  It's all a bit too much for the parents who live their life like they are in a cloister.

The children are all rather withdrawn and lacking in confidence.  Bookish, so to speak.  It's difficult to not conclude that being brought up in the boonies (as much as that is possible in the UK), has shaped their personalities or more accurately FAILED to shape them.

That does not bode well for their futures.  Who is going to offer them employment when they come across as shy and slightly weird?  And how are they going to turn that around in their own life without the upbringing?  Once you slip down a social/economic class it is difficult to climb back up.

Unless you marry a girl from a poor background she is highly unlikely to be content to lower her sights THAT much.

My concern is that these are the very people who in 10 years time will find that nobody wants to marry them, because they have very poor job prospects.

My friend got married in his late 40s without a penny to his name.  He's ill, so cannot hold down a full time job.  He lives on welfare and luckily for him his wife works and does reasonably well with her own cleaning business.  But they have one child and live in a small apartment.

Being realistic about it, Traditionalist Catholics either have to accept children as God sends them or they have to abstain from sex (which in most circuмstances I would think was a undesirable option which would lead to a bunch of problems), since most normal red-blooded people want to have sex on a reasonably regular basis.

The goal therefore should be to get a job and provide an income that two adults and half a dozen children can live on and pursue some character building pastimes and leisure activities outside of simply saying the Rosary and eating their pottage.

Finally, ask yourself what threads dominate this and other forums.  Is Tradland full of wealthy middle class young Trads earning six figure salaries and wondering whether to buy a 5 Series BMW or an E-Class Merc?  Not in my experience.  Are Traditionalists divorcing because our fathers are spending 80 hours per week starting dot.com companies or globetrotting around the world as senior executives?  I think not.

Or - are the threads on this and other forums COMMONLY about young men who find it difficult to find and hold down a decent paying job, or are threatened by Mexican immigrants, complaining about the price of food or debts or think they Joos are to blame for their failure to find anyone to marry by the time they are 30 ?

Age gaps matter less the older you get but if I were to hazard a guess I'd say a 5-7 year gap is ok in your thirties, a 7-10 year gap is alright in your forties, and if you're still looking in your 50s, good on you if you can get a good woman in her late 30s! I wouldn't dip into the late 20s age range unless you're still in your thirties.

Uh, why not ?  A man in his forties who can marry a woman in her twenties counts as more successful in my book than if he settled with a woman already in her thirties.  My reasoning is very simple : Biology.  A woman in her twenties has more childbearing years and is likely to be prettier.  All things being equal, as far as marriage pairing goes, she is superior than a woman who has less childbearing years ahead of her and whose looks have somewhat faded.  I don't think there's anything controversial in this.

However, it's very rare for women to hold out that long and even rarer for them to cross over from the Novus Ordo, which directly caters to them. The good news is, by the time someone that rare comes down the pike, it should hit you like an anvil!

Or one could just try to find a woman who is still young.  My wife is my same age, but I would never tell any of my unmarried friends that once they reach forty they are somehow socially obligated to marry a woman whose first pregnancy would be significantly more likely to carry risks than a woman who is younger.  Fertility begins to decline after twenty-six slightly, starts declining steeply at thirty, and basically falls off the drop off into the deep water at thirty-five.  If such a friend were an appealing match to a younger woman and had one as an option, I think he should be encouraged to get the best he can.  "Stand in place; win or die."

Then there's the issue of how to raise kids traditionally in this day and age, so I hope you have a plan and the wherewithal to follow it through.

Being more established would certainly help.  A man at thirty would match well with a woman in her early twenties.  All things being equal, the age differential makes it so that she gets security and cultivation while he gets children and youth from her.  It's a win-win.