When Austin Forsyth and Joy-Anna Duggar got married back in 2017, their union was initially shrouded in controversy.
Joy was only 18; she announced that she was expecting shortly after the wedding, and reports that she had secretly gotten pregnant before marriage were persistent.
More than 2 years later, however, Joy and Austin are still happily married, and their little family is soon to expand yet again.
Joy is pregnant with her second child, and this time, there are no shotgun wedding rumors to distract from her happiness.
But Joy-Anna is still a Duggar, which means every aspect of her personal life remains to subject to speculation and scrutiny.
So it should come as no surprise that yet another rumor about Joy’s marriage has surfaced on social media.
This one harkens back to a time when Joy and Austin were both single, when they were weighing their options and considering various prospects.
Joy and Austin’s families have been closely associated for years, and the Forsyth’s subscribe to the same arcane belief system as the Duggars.
In the Duggars’ world, it’s not enough to be a conservative Christian — in order to be fully accepted into the inner sanctum, one must also subscribe to the teachings of Bill Gothard and various controversial child-rearing techniques.
The Forsyths passed that test, and so it came as no surprise when their son was married off to a Duggar daughter.
The official narrative is that both sets of parents were overjoyed when Joy and Austin met and fell in love.
But now, many fans are convinced that the decision was made by the elders, and the couple had very little say in it.
In fact, some believe that Austin’s parents wanted him to marry a Duggar so badly that they didn’t particularly care which one he proposed to.
On Reddit, a popular fan theory holds that Austin originally intended to marry Jinger Duggar, but those plans were scrapped when she fell in love with Jeremy Vuolo.
“Once Jinger got married, Joy was all that was left,” one user wrote.
“They twist their love/courting stories into a narrative that God finds them the perfect true love,”
Obviously, that’s not entirely true, as Jana Duggar is still single — but she seems to have little interest in courting.
The primary basis for this flimsy theory seems to be that Austin and Jinger are the same age.
While Austin is almost four years older than Joy, he’s less than two weeks older than Jinger.
Four years is not a large age gap by any means, but when the ages in question are 18 and 22, it can feel like a veritable chasm.
Clearly, that’s not enough to suggest that Austin was forced to marry Joy against his will, but you can bet this theory won’t be disappearing anytime soon.
As with so many other Duggar rumors, we certainly wouldn’t put it past any of the principal players, but at this time, there’s simply not enough evidence to support it.
Which, of course, is exactly why the family is so secretive about certain aspects of their life.
