Originally posted by: Illyrion
You can find reams of peer reviewed papers stating the area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) doesn’t fully develop until the mid-20s and in some late bloomers (usually males) closer to 30. You can find reams of papers explaining the PFC is the center of executive control (complex planning, judgment, decision-making, anticipation, impulse control, and reasoning).
You can find reams of papers explaining that in adolescence there is a time gap between emotional development centered in the amygdala which develops early and rational thinking development centered in the PFC which develops much later and explains why teens generally have high emotionality, behave impulsively, cannot engage in complex planning or long term planning, and engage in risky behaviors they don’t have the capacity to think through.
So to recap: lots of evidence an 18 year old wouldn’t be as well-equipped as a 32 year old to think rationally about or frankly even truly understand the long term consequences of choosing a life partner and lots of evidence an 18 year old would be much more likely than a 32 year old to choose impulsively and irrationally. However because you haven’t found any specific paper focused on ‘finding love’ you refuse to apply the evidence to that situation. You’ve picked a strange hill to die on 😆
Anyway, I suspect no evidence will sway you but how about some bad stats (bad because too many confounding factors to take too seriously) from the US - the land of the love marriage and no-fault divorce. “After five years of marriage, couples who married as teens have a 38% risk of divorce; those in their early twenties are also highly vulnerable (27%), but then there’s a strong decline for couples who marry between ages of 25 and 29 (14%) and ages 30 to 34 (10%).” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201606/the-best-and-worst-ages-couples-get-married
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