AZ, I am NOT suggesting that women don’t get married or that redting shidduchim with different ages is a bad thing. But, you have to realize, that you are asking women to delay finding out about fertility issues by asking them to wait.
Lets look at the YU community – most of my friends married people within 2 years of their age. Why? Generally, they either met in HS (where traditionally those who date date within 2 years of their age) or in YU/Stern, where they also date within 2 years of their age. And there are still PLENTY of unmarried single women. Look at Washington Heights and the Upper West Side – there are a ton of MO singles floating around. So, its not really the age gap that is holding them up at the moment, since the age differences are generally closer. The women tend to get married the summer after they graduate from Stern (I had so many weddings that summer) and the men usually 1-2 years after. So, given this information, why would there be such a problem in the MO community also?
What I want to know now – do you think that people are marrying the wrong people? Because otherwise, the age of the person doesn’t matter so much. What you are kind of doing is saying “Don’t set up short women with tall men because otherwise tall women won’t have anyone to marry.”
I think the better solution, is to encourage marriages between people in a plus/minus age range. Meaning, no longer make it taboo for a man to marry an older woman (I’m not talking ten years, but a year or two). If you try for that balance, you would possibly balance out the young/old shidduchim.
Another problem I’ve encountered in the not-quite-yeshivish community (meaning, non MO, not fully yeshivish) is that as women stay single, they are more likely to get further education, travel, become worldly…so now they are in a strange genre. They don’t fit with MO, but they don’t really want a guy who has been sitting and learning for ten years because he doesn’t really fit them anymore. They aren’t worldly enough. That is an extremely tough one to handle…