EXCLUSIVE | Marriage in a secular age: Why young Catholics are embracing the vocation of lifelong commitment

As secular culture increasingly encourages young adults to postpone marriage, and marriage remains less common than it was in previous generations, a quiet, countercultural phenomenon is taking shape on Catholic college campuses across the country: Young couples are embracing the lifelong vocation of marriage to which God is calling them. 

The median age at first marriage has risen to approximately 28 for women and 30 for men, the highest on record. In 1960, it was about 20 for women and 23 for men. 

As Institute for Family Studies Senior Fellow Brad Wilcox and journalist Maria Baer argued in a recent article, young people, particularly women, are also absorbing a growing pessimism about heterosexual relationships — a sentiment they called “heteropessimism.” 

Despite data showing that married people typically report higher levels of happiness, young adults are often encouraged to remain unmarried and childless, focusing instead on growing in independence, building their careers, and achieving “financial freedom” before they consider settling down. 

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But on some Catholic college campuses — where many students marry shortly after graduation — young people are approaching marriage not as something to pursue only after establishing a life outside the home, but as a vocation through which they can build that life together and help one another reach Heaven.

For Anna and Michael, both University of Dallas graduates, that meant marrying a few weeks after graduation, before starting their first jobs and while furnishing their first apartment with secondhand finds from thrift stores. 

“We didn’t have a five-year financial plan or much of a plan at all,” Anna told Zeale News. “What we knew was that God was calling us to marriage, and we didn’t see any real reason to wait.”

The hierarchy of vocation

Deacon Ryan Sales — a campus minister who oversees marriage preparation for about 20 couples each year at the Catholic university, which enrolls roughly 1,500 undergraduates — said one of the driving factors drawing Catholics toward married life is their understanding of marriage as a vocation. 

“Catholic dating within the context of vocation says my primary vocation is the pursuit of holiness, and then my secondary vocation is marriage, priesthood, whatever the case may be, and my tertiary vocation is work,” Deacon Sales told Zeale News in a July 30 interview. “When you start looking at marriage in the context of vocation, it places it at a higher priority than work.”

Rather than asking why they should marry before achieving success in their careers, Catholic couples formed to see work as something “done at the service of your pursuit of holiness” are asking why they must pursue those careers separately before beginning a life together.

He compared marriage to a “bicycle built for two” on which spouses help one another to reach Heaven.

“You work to support your family, but the principal vehicle that you drive to get to heaven is a bicycle built for two, for those who are not called to religious life,” Deacon Sales said. “We're designed to help each other in that pursuit of holiness.”

This understanding, he said, can free Catholic students from the “pressures that other young people are feeling — that marriage is going to interfere” with the rest of their lives. Work remains important, but it serves the person’s God-given vocation rather than determining whether that vocation can begin.

Deacon Sales also noted that young Catholics striving for chastity want to preserve the sanctity of sex for marriage, which may strengthen their desire to marry young. While secular critics sometimes argue that encouraging young people to wait for sex can push them into immature relationships, Deacon Sales argued the desire for sexual intimacy is natural and properly fulfilled within marriage. 

“It’s okay to desire that, to want to express love for your partner within the context of the marital embrace as one flesh,” he said. “That’s how we’re designed. That’s beautiful and good, and young Catholic couples want to do it right and properly ordered. They want to do it in the proper sequence.”

Seeking permanence in an unstable culture

Deacon Sales said many young Catholics also find sacramental marriage attractive because it offers a permanence that seems increasingly scarce in a culture saturated with rapid technological change and disposable consumerism.

“Maybe it’s because there’s so much instability in the world right now that a renewal of this venerable institution, sacramental marriage, is viewed positively because of the stability that it provides,” he said.

Students who come from divorced or broken families do not necessarily reject marriage, he added.

“I see a lot of students who come from broken homes, who the broken home has become the impetus for them to seek out and recreate — or create — a new, ordered, beautiful archetype of good family,” Deacon Sales said.

For a generation exhausted by uncertainty and constant change, the prospect of sharing life with one person committed to the same permanent goal of Heaven can be deeply attractive.

Dating with marriage in mind

Catholic students are also surrounded by a culture that teaches them to approach dating as a period of discernment rather than merely a chance to “have fun” or enter an undefined “situationship.” 

Deacon Sales said one of the most important qualities he looks for when preparing a couple for marriage is intentionality. The question is not simply whether both people want to marry someday but whether they have discerned marriage to each other.

“Not that I want to get married,” he said, “but that I want to get married to this person.”

That discernment requires more than attraction, shared interests, or even a common faith. Couples must learn how each person responds to conflict, family life, disappointment, responsibility, children, prayer, stress, and ordinary daily life. Deacon Sales refers to those shared experiences as “data points.”

“I think you’re beautiful. I like spending time with you. And we share the same faith,” he said. “Pretty big things, right? That’s only three data points.”

The point is not that couples must date for a prescribed number of years, but that their time together should include genuine discernment and experiences that allow them to understand one another more fully. 

He also asks couples whether they have discerned each other as spouses, not merely as potential parents: “If our Lord never granted them children, would they be content with that particular individual?” 

Catholic colleges also create an unusually concentrated community of young adults who share beliefs about faith, marriage, and family life, making it easier for students to meet potential spouses. 

“Where’s the best place to find a holy man?” he asked. “Statistically speaking, college — a profound Catholic college — is a pretty good place to find all these spouses.”

At the same time, Deacon Sales cautioned against treating discernment as a rigid checklist. Seeking a Catholic spouse is reasonable, he said, but one must remain open to God’s direction. 

“If you want to find a Catholic spouse, go to a Catholic gathering. Go to a Catholic college. That makes sense,” he said. 

But if someone unexpectedly falls in love with a friend who is not Catholic, he added, that person should “allow yourself to be surprised by God.”

That natural emphasis on intentional courtship has led Deacon Sales to look beyond conventional marriage preparation, which he said often begins only after a couple has effectively decided to marry. He has developed an app called Avila, intended to introduce dating and engaged couples to marriage-preparation questions while they are still discerning marriage to one another.

“Marriage preparation gives you the tools to discern well, but it happens too late,” he said. 

Avila provides couples with questions, reflections, practical tasks, and assessments designed to build self-awareness about matters such as conflict and attachment styles.

“The goal being that the day that you decide to get married, you’re doing so with a lot more of those data points than you did before,” Deacon Sales explained. 

Marriage as a beginning

The young marriages emerging from Catholic college campuses may not be numerous enough to reverse national trends on their own. But Deacon Sales believes they represent a meaningful challenge to the cultural pessimism surrounding marriage. 

Catholic students are not necessarily marrying because they believe adulthood will be easy or because they already possess financial security. Many are choosing marriage precisely because they do not believe God has designed them to face those uncertainties alone.

As Saint John Paul II emphasized throughout his teaching on the theology of the body, the human person finds fulfillment not through radical self-sufficiency but through love and the sincere gift of self. 

Young Catholics see marriage not as a capstone waiting at the end of a carefully established life, but as one of the principal relationships through which that life will be established, and more importantly, through which Heaven will someday be reached. 

“I see such a beautiful, beautiful understanding of marriage that’s forming,” Deacon Sales said. “It’s moving and inspiring. It’s inspiring even the older generations.”