What is a reasonable age to get married these days?

Our daughter is now 23, has just finished a 5-year degree, and is about to start a 2-3-year Masters/PhD. Apparently, though, she sometimes worries that she is not yet settled down with a partner, and doing grown-up things like taking out mortgages and buying furniture.

Of course, we tell her, quite reasonably, that she is still way too young to be thinking about settling down, that she should use her twenties to have fun, play the field a bit, and make the best of her lack of ties and obligations, and that her mid-thirties would be a much better time to be finding a life partner and that kind of thing.

But then she, also quite reasonably, points out that her parents got together at university, as did the parents of several of her close friends, and that she even has several current university friends who seem to be settled together long-term and set up for life. Now, in our particular case, we may not have actually married until my wife was 6 months pregnant and I was about to be thrown out of Venezuela as an illegal immigrant, at a time when we would have been about 35 years old. But it is true that we have been together since we were about 21 or 22, and we are still together some 37 years later.

I actually think that all this evidence my daughter has cobbled together is actually sheer coincidence, and that it is not really that common an occurrence these days for people to settle down at such a tender age. But is it really? A bit of research suggests that, in Canada at any rate, the average first marriage takes place when the woman is 29.6 and the man 31, significantly late than the situation in the 1960s and 1970s when the woman was typically 23 and the man 25. A review of the stats for other countries reveals a wide range (e.g. Chile 32.6 for women and 35.3 for men, Morocco 29.8 and 34.3, Ukraine 25 and 37, Banglasdesh 16 and 23), but the general average for developed countries does not appear to be too dissimilar to Canada's, with the average for less-developed countries typically several years earlier.

All of which kind of backs up my theory, although it should be borne in mind that these stats refer to actual marriage, and not to the initial pairing off. Anyway, I think this may be another case for that well-worn mainstay of parental advice: "Do as I say, not as I do".