My thoughts:
Generically: It depends on what you want to do with your life...
There's no way to know, but you'll know when you're ready.
You'll also know when you're not ready.
It's obviously not teachable.
Look at who stays married and who doesn't, who gets married 5 times, who stays with their childhood sweetheart.
It's impossible to decipher.
It's a total crap shoot.
Thinking a little further:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by from another site
I don't think it has much to do with age and much more to do with maturity and commitment. Going into a marriage for all the right reasons and with a mutual understanding of what the marriage will be like will save you a world of headache, no matter how old you are.
I do think that our society has become more self-focused and that partly as a result of that, marital commitments are seen as "forever, but not really." A hundred years ago people got married much younger and stayed that way. They rode out the hard times, dealt with things they didn't like, and stayed true to their commitment. It's not that way for most people any more. When you see a couple who has been married for a long time, it doesn't mean they don't have problems or never had challenges, or that they got married at the "right time." It means they were committed enough to stick it out no matter what.
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Ya know, lets not forget the massive cultural differences between 100 years ago and now. I'm thinking mostly about gender roles. Women are more independent now, where previously they were expected to follow through with a marriage, entirely despite themselves. Back then, what a man decided is what happened, and there was little room for a wife's determination or opinion within the husband's shadow. There's no such thing as compromise as we know it now, and comparatively little consequence to acting contrary to his wife's wishes. When a man's got that kind of dominance, from his perspective whats the point of divorce?
Look at modern Muslim countries, for instance. Very little occurrence of divorce. It's because men have complete control, so there's little interest in it.
I'm just not seeing this fantasy of the bygone golden age of proper marriage. I don't think it ever existed, unless you're a male chauvinist or misogynist. The good thing, though, is that the more we learn about the culture we're creating, the better we as men and women can learn how to make it work on equal footings for the long term. So that golden age just might happen. Maybe.