Watch SBS Insight’s episode on the experience of being married young on Tuesday 12th September at 8.30pm on SBS or live on .
I thought at 24 I was ‘late’ in tying the knot.
I had always dreamed of being married by the time I was 20 or 22, starting a family at 24 and being a well-rounded adult by the time I was 30.
Growing up in the 80s meant I was fed the ‘Disney dream’. I was a hopeless romantic and in 1994 started an intense long-distance affair with a man I met briefly a year before, while he was visiting Hobart.
When he asked me to marry him just three weeks into our relationship, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
He was everything I felt I was looking for and needed at the time.
He was handsome, worldly, stable, caring, and nothing and nobody could convince me I was rushing into anything.
The fact that I had never had a longer than three-week relationship before this was not a red flag, after all, we didn’t know what red flags were in the early 90s.
Back then, popular culture revered romance. Between Dolly magazines, rom-coms and shows like Perfect Match it was clear that the measure of your worth was the man hanging off your arm and the rock on your finger.
Female empowerment was relegated to snagging a man who dared to iron his own shirts – something my Italian mother was bewildered by at the time.
But I was dangerously naive.
I grew up in a conservative Italian household, and the only girl in a family of boys. My parents immigrated from Italy in the late 50s, with my father sponsored by the Australian government to work on the hydro-electric power station in Tarraleah, Tasmania.
Rose’s mother was married by proxy, a common way for Italian migrants to marry while in Australia. Source: SBS / Rose Kokkoris
He had courted my mother before he left Italy, but my mother’s parents wouldn’t let her leave the country to join my father till they were legitimately married. As the story goes, my mother had to show the village priest a letter of the offer of marriage, to prove to him (and her parents) that my father’s intentions were honourable.
My parents then married by proxy, with my father in Tasmania, and my mother in Italy, so that she could travel to meet him, with no shame being cast on her family.
Getting married, having children, being a ‘good wife’ and a great housekeeper, were the things that were held in high esteem when I was growing up. I lived in suburban North Hobart but the language, traditions and culture of home were deeply rooted in my Italian heritage.
Exposure to an ‘Australian attitude’ resulted in an identity crisis in my late teens, but the choice was ultimately made for me. I was an Italian living in Australia, and my father was the undisputed head of our family, respected, revered and obeyed.
And my father loved us fiercely. But perhaps he didn’t know quite how to love us gently. He wanted the very best for me and my three brothers, but maybe he was a little misguided in the fact that he felt we didn’t have the right to choose our own paths in life.
He knew best. And my mother dutifully reinforced these views – teaching me to cook, clean, wash and iron – while my father taught my brothers how to paint, cement, repair and tend the garden…or so they tried.
Why I decided to marry in my early twenties
My father instilled in me a great love of books, and encouraged me to be curious, and ‘question everything’, as long as I didn’t question him.
He chose my subjects for me in high school and university and, as his daughter, I complied.
So, when my knight in shining armour appeared to whisk me away on a whirlwind romance, promising marriage and adventures far from home, I was more than willing to jump on that horse and ride away into the sunset.
However, to borrow from an Italian proverb: “Between a dream and reality, an ocean can pass”.
Rose says she raised her kids with a very different perspective than she had growing up, giving them a lot more freedom to explore their individuality. Source: SBS / Rose Kokkoris
My inexperience in love, and my naiveté in life brought with it an inability to negotiate the complexities of intimate relationships.
Looking back now, after 17 years of marriage, three children, 12 years of separation, a failed and then a successful cafe business, the death of a parent, and recovery from a benign brain tumour – I can see that when I married I was but an embryo.
It was only through traversing the landscape of life, and its myriad challenges that I truly understood what it means to understand and accept myself, why I am the way I am and what I want from this life. It’s only after this realisation, that I can move through this life with any semblance of grace, poise or compassion for anyone else who shares this life with me, whether platonically or otherwise.
I believe that without this knowledge, almost every relationship is doomed, no matter how much you love your partner or how much you want your relationship to work.
As a mother of three emotionally aware and intelligent children, I have made it an imperative that they be given the freedom of self-expression.
To know themselves as deeply as humanly possible, without judgement, shame or guilt. I want them to know themselves implicitly before they attach themselves to anyone else.
I have often said that I have lived my life back-to-front. I married, had children and built a home life, before ‘finding myself’ and fulfilling some personal dreams that have brought me to a level of self awareness and acceptance that I truly do not believe I would have achieved had I not made the incredibly difficult decision to end my marriage.
I don’t regret my 17 years of marriage, because just like every experience in life, it taught me a hugely valuable lesson, and gave me the greatest gifts of my life – my three wonderful children.
For that, I will be forever grateful.
