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The other night, two female friends and three male friends came to visit. Somehow our conversation became not one big six-person conversation but three separate conversations between guy and girl pairs.

After the guys had left, one of my friends asked, “So what were you guys talking about?”

I laughed and said, “Marriage.” It turns out my friends were talking about marriage, too. We started laughing, but it was rather shocking since I don’t consider myself or my friends the marriage-hungry types.

Back in high school, something about marriage would come up once in a while. Around the time “My Best Friend’s Wedding” came out, one of my friends decided we should all get back-up husbands – friends with whom we agreed we would marry if neither was married by age 30. (It seemed like the worst idea ever – what if you met someone a week after you got married to your last resort?)

But now that we’re in college, there’s the occasional “Oh my God, did you hear so-and-so from high school is getting maaaarried?” As if marriage is a disease, but a cool disease only responsible and mature individuals can get.

At the sound of such gushing, my response is usually to ask if this particular so-and-so is Mormon, or if so-and-so is pregnant.

But the conversation I had been having with my guy friend that night was kind of horrifying. (He likes to ask me if I’ve found a husband yet every time he sees me, and what's worse, his response to my dilemma of whether or not to graduate this year was, “But you haven’t found a husband yet.”)

On this night, he was going on and on about how everyone meets his or her future spouse in college, how his own parents met in college, how my parents met in college, how nobody ever meets anyone from work or in bars or in random places – how it has to happen in college!

So I started looking up marriage statistics on the U.S. Census Bureau Web site. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, most recent data show the median age at first marriage to be 24 for women and 25.9 for men.

These ages seem pretty young, but I remind myself that included in these numbers are movie stars and Mormons (Utahmarriage.org shows the median age in Utah is 21 for women and 23 for men).

But I wonder, do these 24-year-old women and almost 26-year-old men know the NCHS also reports 43 percent of first marriages break up within the first 15 years?

On the other hand, the same study reassures us the duration of marriage is directly correlated with the age of the woman at first marriage. That is, the longer you wait to get married, the longer your marriage is likely to last.

But, at the same time, biological clocks are ticking away. Perhaps this means the best way to go is to have kids when you will, and put marriage off for as long as possible.

Yeeahh.

And lest we think the NCHS has not been thorough in their studies, a recent report claims “unmarried cohabitations” are way more unstable than marriages. Whereas the probability of a first marriage ending in five years is 20 percent, the probability of an unmarried cohabitation ending in five years is 49 percent.

College life isn’t the whole world. I know the concept may be overwhelming, but take a close look at that less-than-marriage-material guy or girl sitting next to you right now and decide for yourself. If these statistics show anything, it’s that maybe we should wait before we jump the marriage bandwagon.

There are so many better things to do in college than husband- or wife-hunting.