WHERE'ER UPON LIFE'S SEAS WE SAIL: From the Yale Daily News

...And in that park, tears freezing halfway down her cheeks, half-sobbing and breathlessly reassuring worried passersby that she was okay, Hagan made a pact of her own, and was transformed from girlfriend to fiancee.

That was more than a month ago, and aside from the occasional excited message from her older sister -- "Stephanie, I have six ideas for your wedding, call me back!" -- her senior essay has pushed Hagan's wedding plans to the back burner.

Such are the challenges of tying the knot -- or promising to -- while a student. Considering that the average age of marriage has been gradually climbing since the middle of the century, it's not hard to imagine the reactions the small number of engaged Yale undergraduates have received from their peers. The proportion of their lives women will spend married has decreased dramatically, and a study by the Center for Disease Control shows that 56 percent of women are unmarried at 25, Theresa Kirby of Rutgers University's National Marriage Project said. ...

Hagan's friends have reason to be worried, Kirby said: women who marry before they are 25 are significantly more likely to experience marital disruption. But though Hagan worries about a lot of things -- planning the wedding ceremony, for example -- her decision to marry is not one of them. ...

Sylvia Glassco '05 said the full impact of her commitment to fiancee Carolina Oster '05 is registering gradually.

"The other day I was in the train station, standing in line, and it just hit me," she said. "Oh my god, I'm getting married, and that means I'm a lesbian, and that means I'm never going to be with anyone else, and oh my god! I have moments like that all the time." ...

History professor emeritus Gaddis Smith '54 GRD '61 said that when he got married as a freshman in college, it was significantly less of an anomaly. Thanks to an influx of married veterans returning to school after World War II, including former president George H. W. Bush '50, marriage as an undergraduate was increasingly common.

"I couldn't go out to frats and stay up drinking all night," he said, "but other than that, things were pretty normal."

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