I was a teenage bride

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Thirteen years (and a handful of months) ago, I sat down with my father at the kitchen table of my childhood home in Kentucky, and I asked him: “Would it make things better if Brandon and I got married? Would that make you happy?”

I was 19 years old and finishing my second semester of college at nearby Western Kentucky University. Brandon, my 24-year-old boyfriend, had decided to pursue a second degree in architecture at University of Kentucky, two-and-a-half hours away, and I had resolved to follow him there and share an apartment with him.

My father -- an intelligent, gentle man who fits no one’s stereotype of what a rural Kentucky factory worker must be like; who doesn’t go to church and didn’t raise me to think in religious absolutes -- had nonetheless balked at this plan for living in sin, had told me, with quiet, halting intensity, that I didn’t understand what I was doing. What if I followed Brandon to Lexington, compromised myself by sharing a home with him, and then got dumped? He didn’t say the words “fallen woman.” He didn’t have to.

“Yes,” my father said in response to my question, his relief palpable. “Yes, it would be better.”

Salon.com > Holly Goddard Jones

I was a teenage bride