Why Justin Duggar's Marriage Has Fans Outraged

The Duggar family doesn't have "Counting On" anymore, but they keep making headlines, including Justin Duggar! The 14th child of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar raised eyebrows last year when he got engaged at the young age of 18. Justin's engagement to Claire Spivey seemed outside the norm, even for the fundamentalist Christian reality TV family. But Justin seemed head over heels, stating via a video posted to TLC's website, "There is nothing comparable to finding the one you are meant to spend your life with. We know we have found that in each other."

Duggar fans were apprehensive about the engagement because they thought Justin was too young. On a sub-Reddit for Duggar watchers, a Redditor commented on the engagement photo, "This looks like a high school kid posing with his mom and nobody is convincing me otherwise." Another Redditor commented, "They're just too young. If this was two teenagers dating, fine, but the fact that there's still a not zero chance that these two will be down the aisle before Christmas makes this feel, as you said, wrong." 

But, as it turns out, fans didn't know the whole story. And now they're more outraged than ever.

An Instagram post confirmed that Claire Duggar's husband, Justin Duggar, was only 17 when he proposed marriage. On November 6, Claire posted a video of the couple to Instagram, with the caption, "Hard to believe it has been one year since our engagement! Such a whirlwind day filled with joy!" The clip proved many fans' suspicions that the baby-faced Justin was still legally a minor when he asked Claire to be his wife. Duggar-watchers suspected the engagement date was false because the couple announced their engagement on November 16, 2020, one day after Justin turned 18, per the Daily Mail.

After Claire's post, many Duggar fans let out a collective, "huh?" It. One Redditor commented, "They are CHILDREN." And speaking of creepy, another Reddit user wrote, "Man, their families just remind me how grateful I am that my parents were normal and let me date who I wanted at my own pace."

But there is a prevailing theory about why some people get married so young. As Justin's brother-in-law, Derick Dillard, joked about early marriages in the Duggar family, per People, "We want to have sex."