Interesting. I don't usually like articles like this, because they tend to be too one sided, and because they tend to be too short (would it even fill one typewritten page?) to adequately address the issue. As one of those who married under 25, and knowing many couples who married young as well, I thought I'd comment on this.
I'm not much of a statistician, but sometimes I wish I was. One of the first things I noticed was the statistics: 60% of "young" marriages end in divorce as compared to 50% of all marriages. It would appear that age at marriage is one predictor of divorce, but it would appear to me to be a minor predictor. I don't know how statisticians would quantify such a thing, but, if you could eliminate all other "risk factors" how much is really attributed solely to age?
Another interesting statistic listed at the end: Women are 80% more likely to divorce if they lived with their husband before marriage. If I do the stats/math correctly, marrying young increases the risk of divorce by 20%. It would appear that, for women anyway, co-habitation before marriage is a stronger predictor of divorce than age at marriage.
And I tend not to like some of the "psychobabble" that comes out of these articles. Markos mentions the "endorphin" effect. I've heard of this "endorphin" effect from other sources (Dr. Chapman in Five Love Languages talks about it quite a bit), but not associated with age. While I believe there is an "endorphin" effect, the article doesn't effectively tie the endorphin effect to age. As far as we know, the endorphin effect could apply equally to all marriages, and, therefore, is part of the 50% overall divorce rate, but not contributing anything to the increase for "young" marriages. There's also talk of brain development, life experience, and so on. I'm not entirely convinced that many of these factors are really causitive, or if they are merely incidental.
Nothing in this article is going to convince me to tell under 25's that they shouldn't get married. In my opinion, there are better predictors of marital success than age. In MB terms, things like how much time you spend together (policy of undivided attention), how well a couple learns to negotiate (policy of joint agreement), and how "in love" you feel (love bank balance which depends on the meeting of emotional needs and avoiding lovebusters) are better predictors than age.
