Lorena Villa, a fourth-year transfer student, always thought she would marry after she had finished medical school.
But when the physiological-science student moved with her family to the United States from Colombia, they overstayed their visa and were unable to acquire immigration documents.
“It was really frustrating because I couldn’t do anything, even volunteer in hospitals,” Villa said, adding that without the papers, she could not receive loans and scholarships to finance her education.
When her boyfriend suggested that they get married so she could obtain the documents, she said yes. The couple had met a few years earlier during their freshman year at Long Beach City College, after striking up a conversation while serving meals to the homeless.
“(My situation) was a catalyst for us to get married,” Villa said. “I always saw him as somebody I would want to spend the rest of my life with, but I never thought I’d get married early.”
They wed in October 2006 when Villa was 20 years old and are still together. Both are now UCLA undergraduates living in University Village, an apartment complex for married couples and families that is owned by the college.
There are currently 37 undergraduate married couples living in university housing, according to Hilary Crocker, assistant director of assignment services at UCLA Housing Services. Additionally, 97 undergraduate families ““ married couples or single parents with children ““ live in university-owned complexes.
Nationwide, 7 percent of undergraduates are married, according to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2003.
There are two groups of married undergraduates, said Benjamin Karney, associate professor of psychology and co-director of the UCLA Relationship Institute. The first is nontraditional students, or those who return to college after they get married. The second is students who get married during college.
“The interesting story is the people who are getting married very young,” Karney said, referring to the second group. “They’re defying a number of conventions and separating themselves from the rest of college students.”
Villa said it can be hard to make friends, as she is often stigmatized due to her marriage.
“I don’t have a ring, my husband doesn’t wear a ring,” Villa said. “It’s like if you’re in another country and you tell people you’re from the U.S., that’s what they focus on and they don’t see anything else. When people find out you’re married, that’s it. You’re different ““ they see you as older.”
The couple faced other difficulties in the early stages of their marriage, especially when Villa transferred to UCLA in 2007. Her husband followed in 2008.
“When I was (at UCLA) already, he didn’t understand what it was like to study, and it was really hurting me. Sometimes we would fight until four in the morning,” Villa said. “I didn’t think we were going to make it.”
When her husband also became a Bruin and began to understand the volume of schoolwork Villa had, their marriage improved.
“I (used to be) really negative about marriage because of my experience. There are times when I’ve left my apartment at 1 a.m. and gone across the street to study because I couldn’t be home, we were having an argument,” Villa said. “I still think you shouldn’t get married when you’re young. Marriage is good, it’s just hard and it should be done when you’re in your 30s.”
A paper co-written by Jason Carroll, an associate professor of family life at Brigham Young University, reports that the majority of college students ““ 60 percent of men and 67 percent of women ““ say they are not ready for marriage. And the average age for marriage is on the rise, to about 26 for women and 28 for men.
“In the 1940s and ’50s, marriage was a starting point ““ young people got married fresh out of high school and started their lives together,” Karney said. “(Now) in the U.S., marriage is a culmination, something you do when you’ve got a lot of things in place, when you’ve found a job.”
For English Professor Debora Shuger, who wed a month after her sophomore year at Carleton College in 1973, marriage was a starting point, not the finish line.
She met her late husband, Scott Shuger, two weeks into her freshman year when he asked to borrow her coffeepot. They lived in the same dorm ““ she was in room 212, and he was in 214. By the end of the school year they were dating and, Scott, a junior at the time, had started applying to graduate school.
“He was going to leave, so it was either the end of the relationship or we were going to get married,” Shuger said.
After they wed, Debora followed her husband to Vanderbilt University, where he completed his graduate studies and she finished her undergraduate work. They lived off of Scott’s fellowship of $1,000 a year and the $200 Debora’s grandmother sent every month.
“We ate bean burritos. And pig liver,” Shuger said. “You can’t get that in California, but in the South there are parts of the pig that most people don’t eat that were really cheap.”
The couple had to live apart for a year, when Debora held a position at the University of Arkansas and Scott worked for the Washington Monthly in Washington, D.C. Then UCLA offered Debora the professorship she still holds today.
“We were incredibly lucky. There was nothing for Scott in Arkansas,” Shuger said. “Now, there is a real consciousness of the difficulty that two careers create when you marry young, and you just don’t know where you’re going to be living in 10 years.”
Still, marriage transformed what could have been tumultuous years into stable ones, Shuger said.
“I think I may be the only person who went through 12 years of college, and I never went to a single party, I never got drunk, I never saw dope,” Shuger said. “(As a married student), you could spend all your time working and studying. You had somebody to talk to, you had no breakup crises.”