There are some people, mostly the religious or baby-rabies infected, who want to marry as young as possible.

The majority of young people in the west would prefer to wait, putting it off for ‘one day’.

Here we run into a timing problem.

A young man who is not fantastically successful in romance (i.e. most of them) will be more willing to marry young if a hot lady is on offer. This might be in his mid- to late-twenties. Such a man is also likely to be an idiot who knows little about the divorce grinder and how his children and half his stuff might be taken away. Let alone nagging. He has seen his parents’ example but with the hell-bent confidence of youth he thinks nothing like that will ever happen to him.

A young woman who feels she has many sexual and romantic options (i.e. most of them) will be less willing to marry young. She looks around and sees plenty of potential suitors (even if they are just the dorks ‘liking’ every picture of her and a cake on Facebook) so she sees no need to hurry or settle. She will be more inclined to build her career (in case she needs to support herself in case of divorce, you see), travel, and play the field.

There comes a point when the young man becomes a wise man. He sees the risks inherent in marriage through the bitter experience of those around him. His hormones settle down and he is better able to discern that the cute girl who works at the 7-11 is just a human being, with all the foibles that entails. He notices his own, improved relationship value now that he has established a career and knows what he wants from life. He may still want to marry, but this will now be for reasons of starting a family. In choosing a wife he shall be much fussier than the earlier version of himself. Some in this demographic will turn against marriage altogether, now assured that they can find whatever romantic attention they feel they might need without resorting to commitment.

On the other hand, women hit the wall and notice a sharp decline in the quality of quantity of male attention they receive. They post a duckface picture in front of the Grand Mosque in Cairo and for the first time receive fewer than twenty likes. Also for the first time, they look more closely at who those likes are coming from and are horrified at the looserdom following them. Panic sometimes follows. If marriage-minded, just about anyone will do, and NOW NOW NOW. They also realize that if they want to have children then that fourth sabbatical to Costa Rica might have to wait a while.

The key mathematical point here is the timing. At what age do men and women reach the epiphany? The answer is around 30, which is around the average age of first marriage in a lot of Western and North Asian countries. This helps to explain declining rates of marriage – some men slip into the wisdom stage before an attractive woman has nabbed him, and become too fussy or cautious to marry. Some women crash into the wall before tying the knot, thereby struggling to find a suitable mate should her standards not plummet accordingly.

There are those pained by this state of affairs. Some see an immediate return to patriarchy as the only remedy for the white race (and yellow race, by the way). Me, I don’t care.

Burn this fucker down.