Statistics prepared by Eastern investigators show that for a girl of twenty in our country the chance of being married before thirty is two to one in her favor, and the chances that she will be married before twenty-five are about even. At thirty the ratio of marriage probability within the next ten years is only two to one against her. For a young man the figures differ radically. At twenty his prospects lag behind a young woman's; but at thirty they are distinctly better, and as his age increases, they continue to remain better.
A question of more practical concern should be the query, "At what age am I best prepared for a happy marriage?" No statistical solution can be found for this. It is a personal question that requires an individual answer.
There have always been champions of early marriage. They have pointed especially to the biological capacity for marriage in youth, as well as to the preponderance of early marriages over late in the records of conventional matrimony. In his Modern Marriage Dr. Paul Popenoe makes a strong case for early unions (pp. 49—59). Some of his arguments are cogent: early marriage tends to result in larger families; early motherhood is easier and safer; delayed marriage tends to increase the strain on the emotions. But when the claim is advanced that early marriage permits a wider choice of mates, the very obvious fact is overlooked that a young woman who marries at twenty-three certainly has had a wider choice in the five additional years of unmarried existence than the girl who became a bride at eighteen. Again, when he contends that "early marriages often make for happy and lasting unions," it must be remembered that statistical evidence sometimes points to contradictory results. We doubt, too, whether, as he claims, the children of early marriages will be healthier, show greater intelligence, and live longer than the offspring of more mature marriages. An investigation in Baltimore, conducted by the United States Children's Bureau in 1915, showed that boys and girls of resident parents on the average had a lower mortality rate when their mothers were over twenty than when under twenty.
We find, however, a pronounced tendency to advocate a more mature age for marriage. Thus Dr. S. P. Brooks, president of Baylor University, would have the States enact legislation permitting young men to marry only after they have reached twenty-two and young women nineteen. Dr. Richard C. Cabot of Harvard says that the ideal marriage age is twenty-four or twenty-five. Justice Selah B. Strong of the New York divorce tribunal emphatically avows: "It would be better if girls waited until they were twenty-six or even thirty before they married." Shaw Desmond, Irish novelist and lecturer, declares: "I do not believe in early marriages. I believe a man should marry at thirty-three and a woman at twenty-seven or thirty." Professor Hornell Hart of the graduate department of Bryn Mawr asserts that the best ages in which women can marry are between twenty-five and thirty-three.
This array of conflicting opinions is submitted as evidence for the futility of establishing a minimum age most conducive to marital happiness. Of two young men each twenty-five years old one may have a mental age of twenty and the other of thirty. Two young women born on the same day may differ radically in their physical, mental, and social development when they reach twenty-one. Environment, education, social contacts, religious training, all — far from developing in constant proportion with age — vary to such well-known degrees that the search for a best marriage age applicable to all matrimonial candidates is doomed to failure.
Yet certain basic warnings should be voiced. One of these is: Do not marry too early! The investigations of the Russell Sage Foundation reveal that there are more than 667,000 people (largely white and native-born) in our country who were less than sixteen years old when they married. (See Child Marriages, by Mary E. Richmond and Fred S. Hall.) During the academic year 1930 to 1931 the New York public schools expelled 552 pupils because of marriage. We shudder when we read of the child marriages in Asia; we are horror-stricken when we hear that "over eight and one half million girls, or half of the girls of India, are married before they are fifteen years of age. More than two hundred thousand are under five years, over two million are between five and ten years, and over six million are between ten and fifteen years of age." (Laymen's Foreign Mission Inquiry; India-Burma, p. 247.) But our own marriage laws in about a dozen States permit a legal marriage at the minimum of twelve for girls and fourteen for boys (either by statute or by judicial decisions under common law), while the Child Marriage Restraint Bill, enacted in April, 1930, for all communities in British India, renders illegal the marriage of girls under fourteen and of boys under eighteen, "with penalties of imprisonment and fines for all who contract, perform, conduct, or direct such marriage as well as for the parent or guardian of any minor who contracts such a marriage, whether he promotes it or is merely permissive or negligent in preventing it." (American Journal of Sociology, 1930, p. 1026.)
Investigations of the dates on Roman inscriptions, gravestones, and official records show that at the beginning of the Christian era girls were normally wed between the ages of twelve and fourteen, their husbands usually being a year or two their seniors. In the Middle Ages "feudal society had no place for girls who did not marry, and marry young. It was the Church which came to their rescue.... But what of the well-born girl who was not destined for a nunnery? Of her it may be said that she married, she married young, and she married the man selected for her by her father. The careful father would expect to arrange for his daughter's marriage and often marry her before she was fourteen." (Crump and Jacob, Legacy of the Middle Ages, p. 413.)
Today in the Mohammedan world a child bride of tender years is most highly prized. An experienced traveler among the Moslems relates: "I have in my journeyings had a few opportunities of speaking on delicate subjects with Mohammedans, and occasionally rather intimately. One of the many things which I have against Mohammed is the bad example which he set in marrying a girl (Ayesha) of six, which marriage was consummated when she was only three or four years older. I was once talking with a Mohammedan, and I asked him, 'Soleiman, are you married?' 'No,' he said, 'not yet.' 'I will give you good advice;
mind that you do not marry any one under sixteen years of age.' That is too old,' he replied. 'You must marry them young and make them obedient and humble. If they are too old, they are likely to become too cheeky. No; I must marry a young girl and train her up to my ways and likings.' "
Court records of Chester, England, preserve the following testimony of a sixteenth-century divorce trial which F. J. Furnival reprints in Child Marriages, Divorces, and Ratifications, A.D. 1561—66, p. 25: "Johannes Somerforth ... dicit [says] that he was present bie, when John Somerforth and Jane Brerton wer married together in the parish church at Brerton about twelve yeres ago. . . . He saies that he carried the said John in his armes, being at the tyme of the said marriage about three yeres of age, and spake some of the words of Matrimonye, that the said John, by reason of his yonge age could not speak him seife, holding him in his armes all the while the words of Matrimonye were in speaking. And one James Holford carried the said Jane in his armes, being at the same tyme about two yeres of age, and spake all, or the most part of the words of Matrimonye for her, and so held her still in his armes."
In some historically significant marriages the brides were unbelievably young. Charlemagne's wife, the mother of Rotrud, was thirteen years old when she married. Lucretia Borgia was the same age at her wedding. Anna Melanchthon was fourteen when she married Georg Sabinus, the first rector of the University of Koenigsberg. Margarete of Parma was twelve years old when she married Alexander de Medici and twenty years old when she married Ottavio Parnesio, seven years younger than she. Marie Antoinette was fourteen and a half at her marriage. (For other instances of early marriages see Ludwig Friedlaender, Sitten-geschlchte Roms, ninth and tenth editions, by Georg Wissowa, Vol. IV, p. 140 ff.) And lest we incline to relegate these youthful marriages to the Dark Ages or to distant hemispheres, listen to John C. Campbell in his The Southern Highlander and His Homeland as he describes child marriage in the isolation of our own Appalachian Mountains: "As a rule, marriage comes early in the mountains. A girl is a spinster at eighteen and on the 'cull list' by twenty. The writer has had pupils leave school at twelve and thirteen to marry, although this is becoming less common every year.... There is little comfort for the spinster, relegated to the hard tasks of life, yet dependent for support upon her male and her married women kindred, all of whom are agreed in thinking her a failure. Then you ben't married,' said the weary mountain mother of many children to a teacher from a distant church-school, 'and you don't look like you minded it nuther.' "
The unfortunate consequences of such early marriage are apparent. A Philadelphia domestic relations court finds juvenile marriage a basic cause in many divorce cases, its records showing that by far the majority of couples who found legal advice necessary were well under twenty-five when they married, while "the marriages of those who did not take the step until considerably later are the marriages that are lasting." Judge Thomas F. Graham, who has presided over divorce cases in San Francisco for a quarter of a century, concludes epigrammatically: "Sixteen-year-old brides too often are seventeen-year-old grass widows." Mrs. Minnie Madison, Minneapolis police mother, claims: "The young person who marries before twenty doesn't know true love from puppy love." And there are often other distinctions which youthful spouses cannot make, grave problems that lie beyond the edge of their abbreviated experience. Small wonder, then, that Dr. Harry M. Warren, president of the Save-a-Life League, commenting on these child marriages, enumerates their tragic results in these words: "Many of these children soon after marriage find that they have made a great mistake in their choice, quarrel, separate, get divorced, and supply many of our suicides as well as homicides."
An interesting investigation sponsored by the Women's City Club of New York, A Study of Child and Youthful Marriages in New York County, tabulates the marital experiences of seventy-five girls who obtained marriage licenses in New York before they were sixteen years old and shows that nine of the seventy-five never lived with their husbands; five returned immediately after marriage to their parental roof; fifteen lived with their husbands for two months or less; and twenty for a year or less.
If the privilege of helping to direct the affairs of the government is prudently restricted to those who have attained the legal majority of twenty-one years, should not wisdom dictate that in the immeasurably more personal issue of marriage a similar standard of maturity normally be observed? Common sense, not to make the higher appeal to the seriousness of marital and parental responsibilities, demands that no one assume the obligations of marriage until old enough to know its full implication. With school attendance in many States compulsory until the sixteenth or seventeenth year, it is apparent that the average young man will not be adequately prepared for wedded life until he is twenty-one; and we believe that in some cases a few years could be added to this average minimum with a corresponding increase of domestic happiness. The minimum for a girl may be two or three years lower, but here, too, the reasonable maturity of added years may usually contribute to the solidarity of the marriage.
Conversely, however, it becomes necessary to stress this warning: Do not marry too late! It is deeply significant that the Scriptures speak of "the wife of thy youth" (Prov.5:18); and the picture of two young people, delineated in some of our best-loved poems, as they journey, arms entwined, along the highway to nuptial happiness, will always remain the ideal in marriage. The earlier wedding has been regarded by American scientists as a symbol of success. In their The Builders of America Huntington and Whitney show (p. 251) that successful men married on the average about two and a half years earlier than the less successful. This, the authors say, "is an indication that men who are physically, mentally, and morally sound and vigorous are not only more eager to marry than the opposite types but are more attractive to women and more likely to be well established in their life-work and hence able to support children and wife at an early age."
In their book of reminiscences entitled We Twa Lord Aberdeen, twice Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Governor-General of Canada at the end of the last century, and Lady Aberdeen, representatives of fine Victorianism, almost on the eve of their golden wedding anniversary, advise: "Be sure that you find your right mate as early as you can in life, and let your sympathetic understanding of one another lead you to take up together pursuits outside your business, which will not only be a protection against the carking cares of daily worries, but which will in some way or other be of service to wider circles outside your home. Thus you will together keep your hearts young."
False standards, however, are often responsible for deplorable delay and postponement in many marriages. Sociologists in the Irish Free State are alarmed over the fact that, while the usual marrying age in England is the early twenties, the Irishman's present average is forty. There is reason for parallel alarm in certain trends on this side of the Atlantic. A young man consoles himself with the delusion that he is taking an unselfish course when he insists that he will not marry until he .has $5,000 deposited in the savings-bank. The attainment of this goal requires more time and financial concentration than he had imagined in the balmy days of high salaries. He is thirty-five now, and bad investments still help to separate him from that tantalizing goal. When he marries, if he does, his thirty-five years will generally find him encrusted in acquired customs, with a fixed attitude toward life that scouts all flexibility. How different the picture might have been if a dozen years before he had married a sweet, wholesome girl, whose intuition and advice might have spared him some of his financial fiascos and whose love would have been an irresistible incentive to success!
Or, here is a girl who tosses a defiant head at the cumulative counsel of experience and sophistically declares that she couldn't think of tying herself down until she is thirty. By the expiration of that limit she may look in vain for a marital attachment. She might have had the companionship of a loving husband, the affection of devoted children, the happiness of her own home; but now all this becomes more problematical with every year. Even though a middle-aged knight gallant rescue her from spinsterhood, she will find that marriage at thirty-five or forty may lack some of the verve and thrill which she had anticipated fifteen or twenty years before. She may experience difficulty in effecting the readjustment required by the change from business life to the functions of domesticity; for ingrained customs of long years' growth cannot be overthrown in a few hasty moments. According to normal expectancy her years for child bearing have been reduced; for usually children are not born to a mother after her forties.
It should be remembered, however, that it is almost never too late to enter marriage. Francis Bacon quotes with approval the reputedly wise man who "made answer to the question when a man should marry: 'A young man not yet; an older man not at all.'" As long as there is a sincere and intelligent desire for companionship and the enjoyment of the domestic pleasures, which previously may have been denied, nothing in the Word of God or in the conventions of men would outlaw a belated marriage where husband and wife are of congenial and compatible adaptation. The average age at marriage of the 3,931 new accessions to Who's Who, 1932 to 1933, was 28.44 years, considerably above the age for the general public.
Even though the number of children which may bless a belated union is restricted by the limits of nature's creative cycle, many men of distinction have been born of parents of more advanced years. We may find some consolation in the claim of A. F. Dutton in the Encyclopedia Brittanica (14th edition), whose investigation of 1,000 persons of outstanding achievement shows that children born to fathers of more than forty-five years have twice the chances of inherited capability than those under forty-five have, that the chances are tenfold when the paternal age is more than sixty and fifty fold when the father is seventy years of age. James Watts, John Wesley, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Henry Ward Beecher, are names taken from a long catalog of illustrious men who demonstrate this truth. Even if the mysterious fires of creative life may have smoldered to ashes, there remains in marriage that which must outlive the surging impulses of youth: love, honor, and trust. These are of such abiding value that sometimes Christian experience teaches: It is better to marry late than never marry at all.
At whatever age marriage may be consummated, there should not be a pronounced difference in the ages of husband and wife, if the highest home happiness is to be realized. In a syndicated newspaper article a professional counselor in questions of the heart is asked: "What do you think of a woman marrying a man twenty-five years older than she is? We are both very much in love, but he thinks that a man of sixty will not be treating a woman of thirty-five fairly to marry her; for he will be an old man while she is still in the prime of life. I believe that mutual affection as deep as ours is too precious a gift to throw away and that we should be happy while we can and let the future take care of itself. What do you say?"
This is the answer: "A man of sixty nowadays is still a young man. He isn't even beginning to get old for another ten years, and there is no reason in the world why he shouldn't marry a woman of thirty-five. At that age a woman is old enough to know her mind and to trust her own judgment in such a matter. In many ways an old husband is the best husband, because he is more considerate, more tactful, more unselfish, and more anxious to make his wife happy than a young one. Anyway, age is such a matter of temperament that you cannot gage it by birthdays. There are plenty of men of sixty who are really younger than boys of twenty-six."
Because this attitude is widely shared (witness the distressing number of May-December marriages that crash into first-page notoriety), it may be necessary to sound a note of warning against the logic of this reply. Outside the misrepresentation that a man of sixty is still young or that a husband in the twenties is less considerate, tactful, and unselfish than a more mature spouse, the answer completely overlooks the many disparities which separate the attitudes of this couple as widely as their quarter of a century age difference. That there are exceptions even in fundamental rules is probably more actual in affairs of the heart than in any other field of human experience. Luther's wife was fifteen years younger than he; yet their married life was happy. But before any young woman considers herself an exception and believes that happiness can be hers in a spring-and-autumn marriage, she should at least pause and listen to the claims of experience.
While Aristotle asserted that in the ideal marriage the husband should be about eight years older than his wife, sociologists operating in the Domestic Relations courts of Philadelphia tell us that the marriage age which seems to be attended by the least domestic worry finds the groom at twenty-nine and his bride twenty-five. The happiness ratio is not changed decidedly if the groom's age varies to four years in either way, the bride having a corresponding leeway of two years. The trouble starts, at least in Philadelphia, when the bride is under twenty-one and the groom under twenty-four. And when either is under nineteen, the probability of domestic disaster is one hundred times as great as in the ideal ratio. On the other hand, data supplied by Colgate University psychologists seem to modify these statements. From a questionnaire answered by 5 per cent of the married persons listed in Who's Who, the conclusion has been drawn that it is a disadvantage for a wife to be more than two and one half years younger than her husband, twice the disadvantage if she is more than three and one half years younger, and three times the disadvantage if she is more than five and one half years younger. Distinctly opposed are the findings of Mrs. Jessie Bernard, who told the American Sociological Society that, according to her investigations of the marital experiences of 115 men and 137 women, husbands were most satisfied when they were as old as their wives or up to ten years older, while wives were most satisfied when their husbands were as old as they themselves or up to five years older. (American Journal of Sociology, September, 1933.)
These three studies are united only in endorsing the accepted custom of regarding a slight preponderance of years as a distinctly desirable qualification for the husband. Biologically a woman ages more rapidly than a man. If the bride is five years older than the groom at marriage, it is said that she will be ten years older when she reaches middle age. If she is but a year or two older than her husband, this disparity should ordinarily provoke no serious concern. The younger husband will not find his responsibilities enhanced, his leadership emphasized, and his happiness promoted by a marriage in which his senior wife enjoys the maturity of much wider and longer experience. It is only by the sheerest exception that a marriage like that of Disraeli, in which the wife was thirteen years older than her illustrious husband, can be as happy as that unique union was.
We may agree, then, somewhat facetiously, that the right marriage age is the time when the right man or the right young woman begins to lay happy siege to the heart. The verdict of experience that accrues from a survey of the best and fullest lives assures us that a union of two blended careers of compatible ages, animated by the clean, trustful idealism and in the throbbing vigor of mature Christian youth, holds out high hope for happiness. This harmony of joy is too exalted to be pushed into the offing, too precious to permit the loss of one postponed day.