Reddit reviews A History of the Wife

I think you are mistaken on the age of marriage for women. According to Marilyn Yalom (A social anthropologist) it was around 18 for most European women, with the exception of British women, who married older. And the more wealth a woman had, the older she was married, and the more freedom she was given to choose her partner, which was not the case for E European women.

Look at how marriage would have worked 300 or more years ago:

A man must wait until he can afford a house and can support a spouse to get married. Girls should marry as early as possible, in order to have healthy offspring, quicker recovery from pregnancy, and not be a burden to their parents. This results in large (roughly 10 years) age difference between men and women, as most girls would get married before turning 20, whereas most men must wait until mid 20s or later.

Now consider that most people, especially men, would die very young. War. Work accidents. Heat attacks (no health care).

This means that women were quite frequently widowed before they hit 30! Of course they remarry. Maybe this time to a male closer to their own age. Two babies later, they die in child birth. Now this guy remarries, but a younger woman, but he dies when his horse throws him.

It was very uncommon to have long lasting marriages. 10 years was a good run, and then someone dies. The remaining partner remarries. Someone dies. We have the same marriage rates today, but people live longer therefore, we end the marriages in divorce. These extremely long marriages that we see in older couples, are rare in the long term of society, in that it has only been in the last 100 or so years, that it has been possible to happen. Even in previous times, when there were couples who were married for extensive periods of time, they did not always co-habitate.

A good view of the way marriage used to be is portayed by Marilyn Yalom in A History of the Wife