“Aren’t you a bit young to be getting married?” This incredulous response is a go-to for members of our parents’ generation and our peers alike, and with the divorce rate in the U.S. topping 50 percent in recent years, this skepticism may be warranted. What’s worse, couples aged 20-24 comprise the most at-risk group for divorce, according to DivorceRate.com. Couple this uncertainty with the stress of midterms, classes and extracurriculars, and it is not surprising that marriage is a topic rarely discussed at the university.

Sam Smartt (‘09) and Amanda Slemp (‘10)

Yet every year, a few university undergrads take the leap from single student to faithful spouse despite the negativity pouring in from all sides.

Sophomore Jessica Vineyard met her fiancé, Austin Armstrong, last spring while working at the Dan River Family Restaurant near her hometown of Lawsonville, N.C. By late summer, Armstrong was ready to commit. The couple went canoeing down the Dan River on July 18 and had just stopped off on a little rock for lunch when Vineyard noticed Armstrong acting suspiciously. “He was fiddling around in his tackle box and then he pulled out the ring and just asked me,” she said. “I just shut down for a second; it didn’t hit me until later on that night.”

Vineyard’s whirlwind romance will culminate at her autumnal wedding ceremony on Nov. 7 in Meadows Baptist Church near the house she shares with Armstrong on days that she isn’t in class.

“I’m only taking Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes, so I only stay at my dorm (in Kitchin) on nights when I have class the next day,” Vineyard said. Vineyard encountered some initial opposition to her wedding plans close to home.

“His mom didn’t talk to us for a few weeks at first, unless she had to,” Vineyard said of her soon-to-be mother-in-law. “Now that she realizes that we weren’t just playing around and that we actually thought this through, she’s really happy about it,” she said.

Even young brides who have received unwavering support from their families seem all too familiar with this mistrust of sincerity. When posed the question “So how have people reacted to your engagement announcement?” brides-to-be junior Maggie Lawson and senior Amanda Slemp conjure knowing smiles.

Lawson, who works in what she describes as a “very traditional drugstore,” sometimes receives unwanted advice from complete strangers. “Sometimes it’s offensive,” she said. “But the people that know us know that we have been together for a long time and we can make it through anything.”

Lawson has been with her high school sweetheart, Blake Bohannon, for three and a half years. He popped the question a year and a half ago while they were looking for shells on a deserted beach on

Bald Head Island, N.C. “It was sunset, and we were looking for shells. I was ahead of him on the beach and I hear him call ‘Hey, look what I found!’ and I turned around, and he was down on one knee,” she said. “I started to cry and said ‘yes, of course’.” They have been planning their vintage modern fusion-themed wedding for November 2010 ever since.

“To each his own, I definitely know people that wouldn’t get married until they were 30. I didn’t think I would, but it’s happening and it’s good,” Slemp, whose fiancé, Sam Smartt (‘09) proposed on Aug. 22, said of young-marriage doubters. The couple had been dating for a year and was spending the day touring the Biltmore Estate to celebrate Smartt’s birthday when he surprised Slemp with his great grandmother’s ring from 1915 and a secret engagement party. “We sat down on a bench and he started telling me about this ring,” she said, indicating the huge rock on her finger. Smartt told her the story of the ring — how his great grandfather had no money to his name, got married and couldn’t afford a ring for his bride, so he worked for 30 years to save enough money to buy a big ring and how that same ring has been handed down since 1915 through Smartt’s family.  “And then he said, ‘Oh wait, I have it here,’ and he pulled the ring out and all I could say was, ‘Oh Sam, I can’t wear that with gym shorts,’” she said. Her modern, eclectic wedding is tentatively planned for May 30, 2010, just a few weeks after her graduation.

So how do university undergrads manage planning dream weddings with all the constraints of school work and extracurricular activities?

“I’ve been busy, but not busier than anyone else. I see (planning a wedding) as kind of like doing a senior thesis. It is a synthesizing of ideas,” Slemp, who works as a Resident Advisor and was recently named Homecoming Queen, said. “A lot of times I’d much rather be working on wedding stuff than my homework, but I’ve never slept very much at Wake, so it’s not really that different.”

Vineyard is just two weeks from her 300 guest event and says she is feeling the stress. “Planning a wedding has been really hard. I didn’t realize how much went into a wedding before this,” she said.

For Lawson, whose wedding is still over a year away, the details are less stressful and more exciting. “I sometimes find myself doodling wedding cakes in class, and I do Google for wedding dresses during philosophy lectures, but this really is just giving me something to look forward to; to take my mind off the stress of school,” she said.