Make New York Post a Preferred Source Generations of young women attending America’s conservative colleges have half-joked with each other about leaving campus with two things — a diploma and a husband.
Long before TikTok reinvented the concept of staying barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen as the now-pervasive “trad wife” aesthetic, earning your MRS degree was familiar campus lore — shorthand for a culture where marriage was treated less like a distant post-grad milestone and more like part of the plan.
Madison Beach, 24, thought herself more modern, less susceptible than the girls who’d gone before her, when she arrived at Virginia’s Liberty University in the fall of 2020 to pursue a degree in child development.
At one of the country’s strictest Christian schools, where RA’s prowl the dorms at night to enforce tight rules around fraternization between the sexes, dating isn’t done casually. Sex and living together are supposed to be reserved for after “I do” — which can make relationships accelerate like a lead foot on the gas.
“I thought it was kind of silly, like the whole idea,” Beach told The Post of the way women rushed into their future, so early in life — a concept known colloquially as “Ring by Spring.”
Three days after arriving on campus, she met her future husband. Two years later, she dropped out and got married.
Even as young Americans increasingly delay marriage, the Ring By Spring tradition is thriving in some quarters — a sharp retort to modern-day “hang out” and hookup culture, but also a concept that has come around again as images of women in flowing skirts on bucolic rural farmsteads flood into social media feeds.
And the old tradition is now trending — young engagements and weddings are splashed out on social media, hungrily viewed by millions. And Hulu has even announced a new reality dating show casting college students — for their chance at a “Ring by Spring Break.”
Just 67 percent of American high school seniors now say they expect to marry some day — down from 80 percent in 1993.
But then there are those like Beach, who are happily bucking the trend. The mother of two, now pregnant with twins, told The Post she’d never been pressured into marrying young, and certainly didn’t arrive at Liberty with a marriage deadline of her own. For her, it was love.
“If I was going to get married to someone, it didn’t really matter to me when it happened,” Beach explained. She admits that her faith and Christian teaching informed her decision — but said it was also about her personal preference.
“I personally wouldn’t want to date someone for years because I’m like, ‘okay, I think I know you, and I think I know your hopes and desires, and they line up with mine. So why not just get married,” she asked.
“I know that some people definitely do feel like a cultural pressure,” Beach said of the women at Liberty and other schools like it. “I just did it because that’s what I wanted to do.”
Kristen Nevarez knows about the pressures firsthand. The Southern California-based pastor and author of the upcoming novel Ring by Spring, which takes a comedic look at the modern trend of rushing to the altar, told The Post that while these schools aren’t necessarily telling women to find a husband, the phenomenon is real.
Nevarez began dating her husband, who went to a conservative Christian college, at 21. She married him at 23. She has many friends with similar stories.
“Everyone’s there with sort of the same hopes for the future,” she said of campuses where the phenomenon proliferates. Because of Christian teachings about premarital sex, serious relationships move fast.
“I would just say because of the purity expectations, because you shouldn’t live together unless you’re married, that was why they were pulling the trigger earlier,” Nevarez explained.
Campus life can often pour gas on the fire. Nevarez went to a public college, but recalled her husband describing “dorm date nights” at his — where an RA in a men’s dorm would coordinate a chaperoned social event with a women’s dorm.
Marriage also enters everyday conversation at these schools. Students commonly talk about “praying for their future spouse,” Nevarez said.
She currently counsels students from the same Christian school her husband attended — and said marriage remains a major concern even among women pursuing demanding careers.
“These are women who are studying to be nurses and teachers,” she said. “They’re impressive, intelligent women, and they’re also thinking a lot about marriage.”
On some campuses, the pressure can be intense. When Isabella Duffy, 25, arrived at Southern Methodist University from Miami, finding a husband was the last thing on her mind.
Besides getting used to living in Dallas, one of the most biggest culture shocks she had to get over was the social cachet that women in serious relationships seemed to enjoy.
“The senior girls, as a freshman, really idolized and admired the girls who were in serious relationships,” Duffy recalls. “They were just setting themselves up for what these other girls considered the dream, which was to find a good eligible guy and start a relationship with them in college and then get engaged.”
If everyone around her appeared to be getting engaged or married by 25, she wondered, did that mean she needed to find someone at 20 or 21?
At SMU, Duffy said, the reason for the rush felt less religious and more social — in many Southern communities, a ring, wedding and husband are social markers, Duffy said.
One engagement can still often set off what she described as a “domino effect” through a friend group — with engagement shoots, bachelorette parties and bridal showers flooding Instagram.
“I literally joked with my friend the other day. I was like, I feel like every day I open my phone, someone I went to school with is marrying someone else that I went to school with.”
Another recent Christian college grad from the Midwest who asked to remain anonymous told The Post a similar story — about how the social pull can mess with the heads of women who think they’re immune.
“”There was a sort of social capital that came with that,” she said of Ring by Spring, recalling a steady stream of wedding announcements coming in before Graduation Day. Part of her, she admitted, couldn’t help but think it might be nice “to have that part of my life kind of figured out.”
“Looking back,” she said, “I’m like, no, it wouldn’t have been. I’m really glad that did not happen for me.”
The desire to get one major part of adulthood “figured out” early isn’t just for Christian campuses these days. In an era where uncertainty is the norm — and where the cost of independence climbs ever higher — Ring by Spring, if not named as such, is cropping up everywhere, even on Ivy League campuses.
Recent Slate reporting found marriage-minded students at elite schools including Yale and Columbia, schools that are traditionally secular, to use the Christian term.
Their motivation wasn’t about religion, interviewees said — but about stability. Locking down a life partner early, they explained, would free them from the frivolous distractions of dating — so they could focus solely on academics and careers.
No matter the reasons, experts say that the premature push to settle carries significant risks.
Dr. Eli Kraiem, a Manhattan clinical psychologist who works with many young couples, told The Post that when couple share a bond like religion, or even have common goals, marriage can feel like the obvious next step — even if they have not yet confronted questions about careers, money, sex or where they want to live.
“These can be meaningful reasons to consider marriage,” Kraiem said. “However, they don’t necessarily equate to being prepared for marriage emotionally and mentally.”
And Christian counselor Dr. Antoine Jasmine told The Post he has seen too many marriages between young and unprepared couples end as abruptly as they began.
Shared faith, Jasmine said, cannot substitute for compatibility. Couples still need to talk through finances, future goals, family plans and emotional histories before racing toward the altar.
“Our timing is not necessarily God’s timing,” Jasmine said, warning against treating college, marriage and family as milestones that must happen on deadline.
For Isabella Duffy, the pressure to commit lessened once she left SMU. Today, she urges listeners of her podcast and readers of her Substack to “create your own timeline” — rather than plan their lives around the milestones everyone else seems to be hitting.
“Even if it makes you feel like you’re the black sheep of the herd and that you’re going against the status quo and doing your own thing, that you’re allowed to do your own thing and have fun while you do it,” she said.
“You don’t have to plan your life around these like invisible checklists and timelines just because everyone else around you is doing it.”
