Re: Yes, but . . .

Then drop the belief. Records exist.

Then someone somewhere should've composed a pretty good survey that would reveal this. Can you point me in that direction? Even if I had the means and the time, I'm not going to spend days, weeks, months of my life going over marriage records in Europe. You guys are the ones making this case; ergo, the burden of proof lies with you.

My hunch is based on the fact that I have read a LOT of bios and mini-bios for famous people--writers, artists, inventors, scientists, nobility/royalty, etc.--and I always pay attention to that detail. The great majority of them married in their twenties and early thirties, which is pretty consistent with modern marriage practices. Of course, this skips an important category of people who were unlikely to achieve any degree of status: the very poor. I could see the poor marrying much younger, as a rule, than the middle class and the rich. I think I might've even read that somewhere. And there were quite a lot of them, which tips the probability in your favor. But until I see the numbers, I will remain skeptical.