Do you have an ideal age to get married (if you want to or sadly, can, get married at all)? My parents married in their early twenties, but I can't imagine getting married before age 30.
I ask because scientists are asking the same question, with contradictory results. I'm not surprised at their lack of consensus--marriage means very different things to different people, and determining an ideal age to marry depends on why people marry in the first place.
There's only one reason not to marry, in my opinion, and that's out of fear. Certain people (male and female) enjoy telling women that we're goods with early expiration dates, but it's not true. From my favorite girl guide ever:
I believe that as many over thirty marry out of fear of being alone someday--not necessarily now but some day--as for love of or compatibility with a particular man. The plan seems to be to get some one while the getting's good and by the time you lose your looks he'll be too securely glued to you to get away.
Isn't it silly? A man can leave a woman at fifty (though it may cost him some dough) as surely as you can leave dishes in the sink. He can leave any time before then too, and so may you leave him when you find your football hero developing into the town drunk. Then you have it all to do over again as if you hadn't gobbled him up in girlish haste.
How much saner and sweeter to marry when you have both jelled.
--from Sex & the New Single Girl
, by Helen Gurley Brown
My grandmother (who married in her teens and is still married) agrees.
