THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



day by day they have grown in selfishness, thinking 

 first and foremost of their own individual needs and 

 wishes; and these habits of self-interest, many of 

 them incompatible with the happiness of their mar- 

 riage partner, cannot readily be laid aside. Their time 

 of plasticity, of receptivity, is past. They can no longer 

 make little concessions as they might once have done, 

 in the interests of harmony. Temperamental differ- 

 ences cannot now be harmonised as they might have 

 been at an earlier age. There will not now be the 

 opportunity for mutual sympathy through meeting 

 difficulties shoulder to shoulder as there would have been 

 in the early day of a career that has now reached secure 

 business goals. And so matrimonial disaster may come, 

 as the sequel to what might have been a happy union 

 had it been consummated earlier in life. 



All in all, then, it would appear that the very late 

 marriage as little solves the problem as the very early 

 one, and we are forced here once more to take refuge in 

 that safe territory of the happy mean: which, being 

 interpreted in set terms, perhaps implies that the secur- 

 est age for marrying lies somewhere in the twenties, 

 after mind and body are approximately mature, but 

 before they have begun to fossilize. 



The old Greeks, who fixed the marriage age for men 

 at twenty-five, were probably as near the mark as the 

 nature of the case permits. But of course we must re- 

 member, in interpreting such a rule of thumb, that 

 some men are more mature at twenty than others at 

 thirty. 



[220] 



