At any rate, I think marriage tends to be the sort of thing for which people can’t really be completely prepared beforehand. Newly married couples in their late 20s are, in my observation, generally as clueless as those in their early twenties; the marriage simply needs time to mature and develop either way. In addition, one of the comments most frequently made by those who have been married quite a while is that regardless of how compatible the couple is when they get married, things change once marriage happens. The partner you thought you were marrying isn’t the same person you’re married to four or five years into marriage. This is where I agree with you about the problems inherent in our easy-divorce culture—the biggest problem is that people aren’t trained (and expected) to work through the hard parts of marriage and work for compatibility. Instead, they’re told to find someone compatible and marry that person—as though that will mean the marriage will be easy. The more important thing is to transition the thinking of our young people to help them be aware that this kind of “compatibility” is something that requires a great deal of work during the marriage and get them to think about the work involved in marriage. If they enter marriage with this knowledge—and a commitment to stick to it—getting married at a younger age isn’t a problem in the least.