A certain age
A concerned reader e-mailed me an intriguing question: What is the best age at which to marry? Some time ago, a British professor set down to develop a formula for determining optimum marrying age. He came up with M=Y+(1/e[X-Y]), though some reports spell out the equation as M=(Y+1)/e+X-Y.
M is the optimum marrying age.
Y is the age at which you begin looking for a spouse.
X is the age at which you would supposedly give up looking.
e is a logarithm that boils down to 2.718 or 0.36, depending on which report you read.
I have no idea what any of it means. I was nearly 26 when I married, and Mrs. Happy was 23. Go figure.
In my mind, optimum marrying age is different for everyone. Some people are ready at 19. Some aren't ready at 40. It depends on a person's level of maturity in relationships. It depends on whether they've grown to the point of understanding the depth of sacrifice necessary when pledging one's life to another, and whether they are capable and desirous of making that sacrifice.
Generally, the ages at which one 1)wants to marry, 2)actively pursues marriage, 3)is ready for marriage, and 4)actually marries are four different numbers. For me, the answers were
- 16
- 22
- 25.0
- 25.916
I am fortunate that my marrying age did not precede my ready-for-marriage age. I started dating girls at age 15. At 16, I decided I wanted to get married some day. Six years of insecurity and self-doubt followed. At 22, my loneliness overwhelmed me and I began concocting marriage fantasies around any female who was nice to me. I got over that around my 25th birthday, at which point I realized that my best friend could not continue being my best friend unless I married her. So I did, and she's still my best friend by a long shot.
I didn't mean to go off on a tangent there. To answer the reader's question, the optimum marrying age is 27 for women and 32 for men. At least I think that's what the formula comes out to. I never was that great at math, though.
