Get married if and only if you have met someone with whom you have fallen in love, and who has fallen in love with you; you both want to spend the rest of your lives with each other, possibly including raising a family; and you both feel sufficiently confident about all that that you want to take advantage of legal institutions that provide a broad variety of benefits if you remain together but will make your lives pretty miserable if you ever split up.On this view, marriage is a symptom, not an effect. And it's a symptom of a really good thing! Finding someone you love enough that you want to spend the rest of your life with them, and who feels the same way about you, is a huge, huge positive for your life. (Of course, one or both of you might be wrong, or turn out to be wrong eventually, but that's where the part about confidence levels comes in.) This makes, for instance, studying the effect of marrying early or late or whatever difficult: insofar as people are doing it the way I'm saying they should, obviously people who get married young will be happier, for the intervening years at least, because they've happened to find a massively happiness-generating situation sooner.
Now, I think it's possible some people might disagree with my approach to this question. Most criticism, I think, would focus on the word 'love,' and suggest that one might want to get married even if you don't feel a passionate romantic love for your partner. (I once read an article, on Huffington Post of course, titled something like 'Why You Shouldn't Marry For Love,' although I think it should've replaced the last word with 'lust' based on how it's written, which makes it obviously right.) These arguments, when they're not just flagrantly anti-feminist and thus not worth addressing, are usually economical in nature, or trying to be. Life is just easier with multiple earners, or whatever. In my opinion, it's a pretty important policy priority for society to make these economic arguments for marrying someone you don't love as empirically invalid as we can manage. Marrying not for love has obvious massive psychological costs; insofar as possible, people should never feel compelled or incentivized to do it.
But if we like my approach, and I do quite like it, it raises an interesting problem for the whole "when should you get married?" question: different people will meet the criteria at different times. Some people might not meet it at all. If you meet your soulmate* in college, or even in high school, and feel absolutely confident (even after acknowledging the perils of young love) that you want to be with them by the time you're both 23, go ahead and get married: good for you! If you don't meet someone like that until your late twenties, or your thirties, or your forties, don't get married until you do, and good for you as well. If you never meet someone like that, well, that's unfortunate for you, but, you know, don't get married, and good for you. Hopefully the non-married existence of those of us who haven't met the right person yet, and had them reciprocate the feelings, won't be too terribly miserable, both because we'll be able to support ourselves and because we'll be able to, you know, have a social life and have a sex life if we want to, and so on. Ideally, there is no answer, defined in non-relativistic terms, to this question, because the answer is, get married iff you find someone worth marrying.
*Use of this word not meant to imply anything about destiny; I'm just using it as shorthand for the thing I described in my marriage criterion above.
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