"marrying age" applies more to women than to men. With the extension of the age of compulsory education, naturally the "marrying age" also was postponed. Ach! How is it that you're "marrying age" but not yet married?

Despite the fact that the term "marrying age" is often used in the media, by scholars and in ordinary conversation among ourselves, marrying age after all is from what age to what age? From official data provided by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting, and Statistics of the Executive Yuan, the Population Administration of the Ministry of the Interior, and the Manpower Planning Department of the Council for Economic Planning and Development, all statistics relating to marriage are divided into 15 years and younger, then one cohort for each five years above that. This means that the marriage situation for the 15 and over group is available for observation and analysis. As for what the so-called marrying age is, there is no standard answer.

In the past, the Family Planning Research Institute of the Taiwan provincial government adopted 28 for men and 25 for women as the "marrying promotion age." Ong Yi-ho, a staff member at FPRI, says that this was fixed by taking into account the male's economic capacity, the woman's fertility age, the degree of maturity of men and women, and the age requirements for education. However, when these age standards were produced in1971, the goal was to encourage late marriages. Today the average age for marriage is 29.8 for men and 26.5 for women, already nearing or surpassing the standard figures, so there is no need to continue to extol them.

In several articles by statistics scholar Chai Song-lin which attracted a huge response, the appropriate age to get married would be anywhere from 27 to 45 for a man and 22 to 35 for a woman. He adds that these areonly relatively probable ages for marrying. Shao Li-fang, a lecture at the Shih Chien College of Home Economics, has done a questionnaire survey of Taipei residents. She discovered that most believe that the best age for marriage is 28 to 35 for men and 25 to 28 for women. Based on statistics from 1989 for the Taiwan area, the age which had the highest number of men marrying was 27, with 25 being the age with the largest number of women marrying. The cutest response was by a single woman: "When you begin to receive 'red bombs' [invitations to friends' weddings, traditionally printed on red backgrounds] one after another, that's the appropriate time to get married!"

The concentration of "red bombs" varies with the era. Ten years ago, the number of women who were 30 before they wore the wedding dress was less than 4%; today there are 800,000 unmarried women who are 30 or more. If you ask professional marriage intermediaries, the possible range of "marrying age" is even larger.

Marriages in which the man and woman are the same age, or even "marrying elder sister," are more and more common, extending the marrying age for both men and women. Add to this that modern people are more carefree about heirs, and also that medical advances have decreased concerns about having children at a later age; and moreover it is more and more popular for the divorced or widowed to seek a second spring--all these things mean that age is already not a crucial factor in deciding on whether it is appropriate to marry. The only condition is--that one be single!