kutulu:
"Your" is a common colloquialism for "one's." Emphasizing the "your" is, therefore, taking it completely out of context. I wasn't telling any specific person that she would get divorced if she were to marry before 25 (I'm not sure who I could have been speaking directly to anyway since little_tippler is 25). I was stating that if one takes any random woman who got married between the ages of 20-24, there is a significantly larger chance that that woman will get divorced than any random woman who got married at a later age. This statement, of course, was being made in support of the intuitive statements others had made that 25 is a good age to start thinking about marriage. The US divorce statistics agree.
Naturally, either someone is going to get divorced in the future or they are not - making some statement about statistics isn't going to change that. It will also not change, however, that 36.6% of divorces involve women who got married between 20 and 24. The statistics are not for predicting that someone will get divorced, they are for pointing out that there are factors in play earlier in life that contribute greatly to the odds of one getting divorced. As analog has said, at those younger ages it is much more common for an irrational "love" to be in play and it is MUCH more common that - despite thinking they do - many people do not truly know themselves yet. This is especially true for people who go through a university education IMO.
If I presented statistics showing that 36.6% of accidents - a larger share than any other type of accident - were caused by drunk drivers, you wouldn't say "we're talking about
one person here, you can't predict they're more likely to get in an accident just from driving drunk!" you would acknowledge that driving drunk makes it more likely that the person will get in an accident. Likewise, getting married under 25, for whatever reason (and I suspect there are many), makes it more likely that one will end up divorced. Should we take these statistics and crash every marriage of people under 25 screaming not to get divorced? Of course not! But in a discussion regarding what we generally think a good age to start considering marriage is, they are certainly applicable to show that, generally, it is not a good idea to get married under 25.
In fact - and I realize this does not provide any "official" support for my statement - in my family there are many examples of this. Both my parents were married before 25 - I believe around 20, but I could be off by a few years. They both (obviously) divorced their previous spouse after only a few years and got married to each other. They have now been married for nearly 30 years and I am comfortable enough to "bet my life" that they will die married. I can also think of two uncles of mine which have lived similar experiences - married under 25, divorced, got re-married and those marriages are going strong. In the interest of full disclosure, I have another uncle who got married under 25, also got divorced, and is now having troubles with his second marriage. Of course, unlike his first marriage which lasted something like a month or two, this one has lasted 16 years (and they are not yet divorced, only having marital troubles which may lead to it). Admittedly, since they are extended family I am not as intimately aware of their relationships as I am with my parents, but I am quite comfortable stating that the marriages of the first two uncles I mentioned are in good condition. In fact, it was one of those uncles who got married under 25 and ended up divorced that first imparted the wisdom to me that it was good to wait until you were at least 24 before getting married (and this was when I was maybe 13 years old
). After that, the statement was frequently supported in things I've read and learned in both school (such as sociology classes) and my free time. It has become a bit of an interest of mine to see the effects of age on marriage success. As for the rest of my extended family (it's large), they are either on their first marriages, or in the case of the couple others who have gotten divorced, I do not know the age at which they were first married.