People get married everyday. Some folks are old, some middle aged, some young adults. In fact, the average age for a woman to get married in the United States is 27 years old. That is not crazy, in fact, it makes logical sense for people to wait until their late twenties to get married because they are more financially stable as well as more mature. However, it seems to me that women in the South get married much younger than anywhere else. My mom married my dad when she was twenty and he was twenty-three. That may sound very young, but it is not that unusual. I have been in college for three and a half years and the wave of people I went to high school with getting engaged has only just begun. A few girls got married right out of high school, but that was less common. Now, though, it seems like every week someone new is engaged. And I am a part of the epidemic! One of my teachers actually brought this topic up in class one day. He is from the North, and he said he found it very different than what he was used to. He said that every semester he has at least one or two girls in his classes that are engaged. For me, though, it is not strange to be engaged so young because I have been with my fiance for over five years. While yes it is a trend in the South to marry young, I think it has something to do with the fact that a lot of people start dating young and date the same person forever. Also in the South family is a huge deal and a woman is expected to be a good wife and mother. A long time ago women were married very very young and maybe since the South has a tendency to be rooted in tradition, that tradition never died. It just is the norm to marry young. However, there is a certain stigma behind it. Some women did in the past (and some still do) go to college just to find a man to marry. People call that getting an MRS degree. Hardy har har. Right after I got engaged and posted it on Facebook (like you do) one of my old guy friends who happens to go to Alabama commented on it and said something along the lines of, way to get that MRS degree Erica. And that really hit a nerve with me because I went to college to get an education and I should not have to apologize for also planning a future for myself. But I digress. I think women in the South are taught at a young age that it is okay to want to get married young, and so the pattern continues. I do not think that women getting married young is exclusive to the South by any means. It just seems, to me, to be a prevalent pattern.