By Dr. John Boakye
Life is a continuous process but to make our studies of life easier, we arbitrarily group life into stages with physical, mental and social characteristics. For we have infancy (1-5}, childhood (6-11) adolescence (12-17) and after that adulthood which is further sub-divided into mid-life (35-54) young old (55-65), middle old (65-75) and old-old (over 75). Old age is seen as the later part of life. There is no general definition of old age. Therefore you are as old as you feel but the United Nations have set 60 plus as old age.
Marriage is a basic human right to be expressed freely by the individual. In Ghana, the legal age of marriage is 18 with no limit put on it. People therefore marry at different stages of their adult life. Today many are marrying later in life; age of first marriage in Canada is 31 for men and 29 for women. In the US, it is 29 for men and 27 for women and according to the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey 2014, while the first age of marriage for women is 20.7, before age 15, about eight percent of them had already married and by age 18, another 29 percent had also married In Ghana and everywhere some marry during old age.
