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Seeing peoples' conflicting anecdotal responses (mine included) made me curious about the actual statistics about age at marriage and quality of marriage/likelihood of divorce. Here are a few things I dug up: (To simplify things I only looked at stats for U.S. marriages - apologies to the rest of the world.)
Adolescent marriages are more likely to end in divorce than are marriages that take place when people are in their twenties or older. This is true for both whites and African Americans. After age twenty-six for men and age twenty-three for women, however, age at marriage seems to make little difference (Glenn and Supancic, 1984).
"Figures released last year from the National Center for Health Statistics found nearly half of marriages in which the bride is 18 or younger end in separation or divorce within 10 years. For brides 25 and older, half as many marriages break up."
--From an Associated Press story printed as "More teens jumping the broom" in USA Today; "Sharp Increase in Marriages of Teenagers Found in 90's" in the NY Times
There were a lot of other un-referenced statements to the same effect: Low age at marriage is positively correlated with higher probability for divorce IF the people getting married are younger than X (ranges from 20-26 depending on race and gender, see above).
However, it looked like most of the studies were correlational studies and didn't take a lot of other variables into account, such as socio-economic status, whether the people getting married were from divorced families (leads to + divorce - intergenerational risk transmission), religion, etc.
So what does it all come down to? Sounds like it's better to get married when you're both economically stable and emotionally mature. For some people that correlates with age, for others it doesn't.
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"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
- Anatole France
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