On March, 12, 2009 8:05 PM , Mehmed Mustafa Hamdi
from Turkey said:

Afzal, I know that's not exactly what you are getting at, but I think there's a problem with the idea that just because divorce rates are high among younger couples people should postpone marriage to late ages. Actually, marriages at a late age also have a high divorce rate nowadays. Perhaps they are respectively lower but that'd be rather because older married couples don't want to lose the only marriage chance that they have got. The problem is not with the early marriages but with the attacks of the modernity and the deteriorating moral standards that cause so many divorces.

My parents and their contemporaries all married before the age of 20 and divorce rate was so low then.

From what I could take out of the mouths of my parents and relatives, they were really happy in the first 15 "younger" years of their marriage and never stopped loving each other. They got married through an arranged marriage of course because they were in a traditional Turkish village community more than forty years ago. It was the year 1966 when they got married.

It's the faulty mentalities that cause problems in marriages. I think that especially those pious boys and girls who were raised with better Islamic manners and with empathy and understanding for the others should be allowed to get married early if that can be afforded. And we should work toward an ideal that would make earlier marriages affordable for our youth.

As can be seen, it's the changing and "egoisticizing" mentalities that is the problem and not the early ages. It's a certain act of unwisdom and unreason to discourage our young people from the sacred environment of marriage that would be the safest haven for them from fornication and other sins, because of reasons like these.

And please read my "aphorisms" below!

Teach people to share, empathize and tolerate at early ages instead of encouraging them to get mar

On March, 12, 2009 8:10 PM , Mehmed Mustafa Hamdi
from Turkey said:

Hey why has half of my reply not appeared?

The rest is as below:

And please read my "aphorisms" below!

Teach people to share, empathize and tolerate at early ages instead of encouraging them to get married after they are thirty! That way we will save the marriages, not otherwise!

And remember that divorce is permissible if not likeable, whereas fornication is far too sinful and far too greatly forbidden!

Frequent or infrequent lustful looks at the secular-minded and scantily- or tightly-dressed women in the modern societies that we have to and will have to live in for a long time are part of most of our young men's lists of sins. Sins that could be easily erased from these lists through marriage...

If "maturity" were so important and people needed to be fully mature before they got married as many of our elders and even imams emphasize nowadays, then we would have to conclude that nobody, not even a woman, must get married before the age of forty, that is their truly mature age!

Best regards,
Mehmed Mustafa Hamdi

I do believe I've mislead you to believe I discourage early marriage.
While I do believe early arranged marriage has holistic benefits, early marriage based on love spells disaster in every sense.
I wish to stress here that my post was intended to debate love marriage vs. arranged marriage, and age is a secondary matter.

On March, 15, 2009 3:00 AM , Mehmed Mustafa Hamdi
from Turkey said:

You are so right about the so-called love marriages. Falling in love is a kind of insanity. Men and women should not be together for enough time to fall in love with each other actually.

One of the reasons why I know love (not normal love among the humankind but the sort of love that is fallen into) is insanity in the literal sense is that I used to fall in love when I was more stupid and had much more of my anxiety disorder. As I recovered, I have completely stopped falling in love.

Maybe we should rather try to choose those women (or men for the sex opposite to mine) whom we will develop a more sensible and fairer type of love for. I myself want to choose my wife very carefully and rationally before marriage because I want to find such a wife that I will love and respect more and more as time goes by in our marriage. This won't be the passionate and reckless type of love that people "fall in".

Of course, growing in love for your wife depends on your character too. One should first check oneself and try to make sure that he can appreciate the good sides of other people's character rather than focusing on their faults. This is the doctor's receipt for being happy and making other people happy in marriage and elsewhere.

So, the real love marriages are the well-calculated, reasonable marriages because they will develop the right kind of love at the right time, not the wrong type of love that comes way before it is needed actually! The foremost element in the calculation must of course be the Godliness or God-consciousness or piety or devoutness of the wife/husband candidate. Then comes physical attractiveness of the potential spouse in your own eyes and then other criteria, as far as I know.

Regards Afzal, my dear brother in religion, and thank you for this good post.