Abstract
Marriage is socio, cultural and biological event that for the sake of its basic role has major importance in family formation. Therefore, stability of group, quantitative and qualitative of successive generation life is related to marriage.
Marriage is one of social organization that is for doing family functions as, reproduction, children training and cultural transmission and as a means for order creation between individuals relationship. Each society has rules about formation and dimension of sex relationship Beginning age for these relationships is dependent on the rules that in usual is changing from 13 to 27 in different countries.
The statute age at marriage in Iran, is 13 for girls and 15 for boys. The figure shows that men and women age at marriage in Iran is changing during 12-35 for women and 15-40 for men. After 1345, age at marriage for women has increased gradually (from 18.4 to 23.2 in the year 1381).
The age pattern of marriage in Iran, on the base of people beliefs state that husband should be older than wife and it is necessary to be 5 to 10 year age differential. The existence figures show that between couples age in the year 1345 was 6.6 year and in the year 1381, was 2.7 year differential.
Increasing in women age at marriage and no change in age at marriage for men has caused decreasing in age differential between couples. Meanwhile, by increasing the mean age at marriage for women, differential age between couples have more decreased. There are relationships between age at marriage and education, nationality, residential status, and in general, socio-economic status of individuals. Also age structure of population (unbalance between married men and women) is one of effective factors on changes in age at marriage in Iran.
The aim of this study is to distinguish changes of women's age at marriage and compare its changes with age at marriage of men in recent
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