Wedding bells can wait

The other night, two female friends and three male friends came
to visit. Somehow our conversation became not one big six-person
conversation but three separate conversations between guy and girl
pairs.

After the guys had left, one of my friends asked, “So what
were you guys talking about?”

I laughed and said, “Marriage.” It turns out my
friends were talking about marriage, too. We started laughing, but
it was rather shocking since I don’t consider myself or my
friends the marriage-hungry types.

Back in high school, something about marriage would come up once
in a while. Around the time “My Best Friend’s
Wedding” came out, one of my friends decided we should all
get back-up husbands ““ friends with whom we agreed we would
marry if neither was married by age 30. (It seemed like the worst
idea ever ““ what if you met someone a week after you got
married to your last resort?)

But now that we’re in college, there’s the
occasional “Oh my God, did you hear so-and-so from high
school is getting maaaarried?” As if marriage is a disease,
but a cool disease only responsible and mature individuals can
get.

At the sound of such gushing, my response is usually to ask if
this particular so-and-so is Mormon, or if so-and-so is
pregnant.

But the conversation I had been having with my guy friend that
night was kind of horrifying. (He likes to ask me if I’ve
found a husband yet every time he sees me, and what’s worse, his
response to my dilemma of whether or not to graduate this year was,
“But you haven’t found a husband yet.”)

On this night, he was going on and on about how everyone meets
his or her future spouse in college, how his own parents met in
college, how my parents met in college, how nobody ever meets
anyone from work or in bars or in random places ““ how it has
to happen in college!

So I started looking up marriage statistics on the U.S. Census
Bureau Web site. According to the National Center for Health
Statistics, most recent data show the median age at first marriage
to be 24 for women and 25.9 for men.

These ages seem pretty young, but I remind myself that included
in these numbers are movie stars and Mormons (Utahmarriage.org
shows the median age in Utah is 21 for women and 23 for men).

But I wonder, do these 24-year-old women and almost 26-year-old
men know the NCHS also reports 43 percent of first marriages break
up within the first 15 years?

On the other hand, the same study reassures us the duration of
marriage is directly correlated with the age of the woman at first
marriage. That is, the longer you wait to get married, the longer
your marriage is likely to last.

But, at the same time, biological clocks are ticking away.
Perhaps this means the best way to go is to have kids when you
will, and put marriage off for as long as possible.

Yeeahh.

And lest we think the NCHS has not been thorough in their
studies, a recent report claims “unmarried
cohabitations” are way more unstable than marriages. Whereas
the probability of a first marriage ending in five years is 20
percent, the probability of an unmarried cohabitation ending in
five years is 49 percent.

College life isn’t the whole world. I know the concept may
be overwhelming, but take a close look at that
less-than-marriage-material guy or girl sitting next to you right
now and decide for yourself. If these statistics show anything,
it’s that maybe we should wait before we jump the marriage
bandwagon.

There are so many better things to do in college than husband-
or wife-hunting.