Rider Strong Says It Actually Did Make Sense for Cory and Topanga to Get Married at 18 on Boy Meets World

The issue of Cory and Topanga’s engagement and eventual marriage in the final seasons of Boy Meets World continues to be a hot topic among the show’s stars.

Danielle Fishel, who played Topanga in the beloved sitcom opposite Ben Savage’s Cory, is on record as thinking that at just 18 years old, the characters were too young to tie the knot. But on the most recent episode of the Pod Meets World rewatch podcast, Fishel’s co-host and fellow Boy Meets World alumnus Rider Strong offered a persuasive counterargument.

“It’s always being posited that Cory and Topanga are weird or unusual when the reality is, actually, by their community standards, they are very typical,” Strong pointed out.

The insight came during Fishel, Strong and co-host Will Friedle’s deep dive into Boy Meets World’s sixth season premiere. The September 1998 episode picks up right where the season 5 finale left off, with Topanga having just asked Cory to marry her at their high school graduation. Savage’s character quickly accepts, and after their brief attempt to keep their engagement a secret goes awry, they ultimately tell their friends and Cory’s family about their plan to get married.

Friedle, 48, noted that it was odd for the characters to insist that they were getting married right away rather than simply announcing their engagement, and Strong, 45, agreed.

“It’s an easy off ramp for everybody, because the parents could be like, ‘Yeah, why don’t you get engaged and see how it goes?’ ” he said. “Like, everybody would be fine, like, end of episode.”

Instead, his parents’ objections only seem to galvanize Cory, who points out that his mom and dad (Betsy Randle and William Russ) themselves got married when they were 18.

Strong, at least, took the character’s point. “They are doing exactly what her parents did, what his parents did, what Feeny did,” he noted, referring to Cory and Topanga’s longtime teacher played by William Daniels. “Like, everybody got married young.”

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Cory and Topanga ultimately wait until the show’s seventh and final season to actually say “I do.” And while the characters remained happily married 14 years later in the Disney Channel’s follow-up series Girl Meets World, Fishel still believes they were too young for marriage.

“There are stories of it working out but I would say, on a whole, getting married right out of high school is not usually ideal,” she told PEOPLE last year.

On an August 2024 Pod Meets World episode, she explained why the characters’ marriage in the show’s final season was something she would have changed about the series.

“I think I might have her still do the proposal,” Fishel, 43, explained, “and maybe he still says yes, and we go through the whole planning, and then we end up deciding it’s maybe not the right choice for us right now. And we still stay together. We don’t have to be broken up, but maybe we just save the marriage aspect for the end of the show and not spend the last, like, full year of the show married.”

“I know from my just my memories of it, after we were married, feeling like, well, now we’re married, and they had to come up with new, like, upping the stakes for us,” Fishel added. “And I remember not loving those stakes.”