Arkansas parents, you can now rest easy because an old law allowing anyone to marry with parental consent has recently been repealed. No longer can your three year old beg to marry their preschool sweetheart. And we KNOW how persuasive the argumentative skills of a toddler can be! Um….yeah…

The 2007 bill that originally stated “In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage.” The exact wording of the revision wasn’t made clear. Certainly the months leading up to this change were riddled with hillbilly jokes. Poor Arkansas….first the Clintons, now this.

Rep. Will Bond sponsored the bill last year and said that no children tried to wed under the law. It was changed because legislators feared pedophiles would try to take advantage of the wording. Tell me, what parent would sign their kid or teenager over to some creepy man (or woman) for marriage??

Take away the pedophile aspect altogether for a moment. What parent thinks it’s a good idea for their teen to marry at all - even to another teen? I guess Arkansas was just trying to help out dumb ill-informed parents.

Sorry teenagers, I know you are waaaay smarter than your parents, but I’d venture to say that teen marriages don’t work out 9 times out of 10. Kudos to the ones that do! But I know the boy I loved in high school is not the man I wanted to marry once I exited the fog of teenager-dom.

Do I regret that love or the subsequent loves after? No. Some say we never really loved those from our youth, but I disagree. I think back on the boys I openly or secretly loved and now that I loved them as much as I could at the time. Each first kiss, each love letter; all ingrained in my memory. Each broken heart, given or received help to mold me into the woman I became; the woman my husband gave his heart to so completely. Each relationship helps to mold us into the spouse we’ve become (or will become).

Anyone out there get married when they were very young (18 or under)? I’d love to your story!

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