In a world that tells you divorce is inevitable if you get married young, I did the unthinkable: I got married at 22 . . . straight out of college.

We had no money and lived off love for the first couple of years in a cheap apartment in the worst part of the city. Black specks came out of our water pipes sometimes. Occasionally we had to take back roads to get to our apartment because police had the nearby roads blocked off for searches. Regardless, we were happy.

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We eloped for our wedding. I want to say the whole wedding package was $150, and it would have been cheaper if we hadn’t had them take a picture of us at the altar. I wore a $20 dress from Target and my husband wore khakis and a T.J. Maxx button-down.

We had a larger ceremony with friends and family later at our local church. This is the date we consider our anniversary, and it looked more like the typical wedding. This was still a very affordable wedding by just about anyone’s standard.

I didn’t realize how young we were when we first married. I had my first “big girl” job, and felt like I was old enough to take on the world. Years later, we are still happily married, now with two kids, and we’ve moved out of our cheap apartment into a starter home in a nice neighborhood.

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I don’t think waiting a few years to get married would have mattered for us. If anything, I think getting married so young helped us to learn to work together, communicate, and solve problems together. In other words, we have grown up together.

When talking about something as serious as marriage, it is no doubt important to know how big of a commitment it is, but there’s not an age for that. I treasure the extra years I get to spend loving my husband.