I come at this from both a clergy perspective and a personal perspective.  First, the personal.  My husband and I have been together since high school.  We started dating our senior year and were head over heels in love from the start.  But we didn't get married until seven and a half years later.  We were both twenty-five at the time. 

Now - could/should we have gotten married earlier?  It certainly would have taken all of the family pressure off.  It would have taken all of those comments about "living in sin" away.  It might have been more socially acceptable. But we weren't ready.

My husband and I changed a lot in our early 20's.  We wrestled with life goals, with vocation (especially whether I was going to be a pastor or not), with where was the best place to get our education.  We spent a lot of time living a part, a lot of time living in different states.  Our marriage is based on the fact that we are individuals who choose to love one another - and to be individuals, we needed the room to go where we were called. 

What kept us together?  I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it was sheer stubbornness, or if we were always that committed to one another.  Or if no matter how we changed, we kept coming back to the fact that we still wanted to be a part of one another's lives. Had we married early, I think we might have felt obligated to stay together.  After seven and a half years - we knew that we wanted to. We knew what it meant to make that kind of commitment. 

We didn't let all of the social pressures tell us what we should do. We waited until we were absolutely to say yes for a lifetime.