Is there an ideal or perfect age to get married? Our society seems to think so, given when boys and girls enter the shidduch parsha. What do you think? There are separate polls below, one for girls' ages and one for boys' ages. Feel free to vote in both polls.
Note and thanks to "G": Clearly the "ideal" age is whenever you actually find your bashert and get married. However, we all start looking at particular ages. Presumably, if we found our mates quickly, we'd be marrying at the age we started looking. So let's amend the focus of the poll a bit. What is the ideal age to begin looking to get married.
6 comments:
your poll is no different than the problem your are proposing to solve, all the options are predeterminate.
There is no "ideal" age or life stage. Each person should get married when they decide, after a careful thought process, that they are "ready".
I am greater then my friends since I married at 16 and if I had married at 14 I would have said to Satan "an arrow in your eye"
Also see what my friend Rav Huna said about someone who is still single when they reach 20 years of age (as mentioned on Kiddushin 29b)
My great grandmother was married at 12. Try that today and they will lock you up as a sexual predator and throw away the key. Not everything in the Gemorah has direct congruence to things today. What the Gemorah is saying is to marry young, and young is a relative thing. 24 is still young when people are living well into their late 70s, their 80s and their 90s. The Gemorah also talks about all the things that a man, as a husband, has to provide for his wife. You want to go back to the Gemorah times? Let's start there, you know, with working husbands.
ProfK
First off I agree 100% with the need for the husband to have a parnassa before getting married. However I disagree with your point in the Gemara, The Gemara in Kiddushin does not seem to be discussing a sociological point which would just mean to get married early in life which could be relative to the entire expected lifespanbut rather a psychological point which is that at around 20 there is an irreversible psychological change. this psychological point is as true now as at the time of the gemara and our expected lifespan does not affect this point. While we have to remain practical and not suggest marriage before the husband is practically able to support a household we should not be under the illusion that this is the "ideal" age for marriage but rather that it is non-ideal but we have no choice.
Tzvi,
Devil'S Advocate:
Is it possible that the psychological change that the Gemarah is associating w/ a given age could change based on changes in sociaties, changes in general life styles, social progresion/regression, educational practices etc.?
g
I am not enough of a psychologist to know for sure if it is possible but my guess is that it does not change, just a simple expression is the amount of teen sex (not to mention college sex) going on both inside and out of the jewish community. someone who keeps halacha and does not have sex outside of marriage will be having those drives unsatisfied for many years which seems to be the cause of "Kol Yamav BHirhur Aveirah"
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