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I just attended the wedding reception of a desperate LDS 22 year old niece, returned missionary, who married an equally desperate 32 year old returned missionary PhD researcher, a brilliant guy, who wondered "what is wrong with me" because he couldn't find a girl until such a late age. If this niece had found a man before her mission, she would have married him in a heartbeat, but she didn't, so she went off for her 18 month stint and tried again after she got home.The niece's two younger brothers are 20 (a returned missionary) who is feeling the pressure to marry lest he fall in sin (those hormones are ragin') and his 18 year old brother who doesn't even bother to date because he says all the girls his age are holding out for returned missionaries. He will leave for his own mission inside the year.And there, in one family, you have the gamut of LDS wedding related behaviors from high school to marryin' age, which is before they get out of college. Desperation seems to be the common denominator here and that tells you much about what you need to know.The LDS (including most of the answerers to this question) don't seem to realize that young people in the gentile world simply DO NOT MARRY while in college. Nobody even thinks about it and they're certainly not desperate about it. But Mormon girls are at least thinking about it at 18, Mormon boys are obsessed with it after they return home from their missions at age 20-21, when they're only freshmen or sophomores. Just read the other answers, wherein they protest, “Whaddyamean? I didn’t get married young, I was almost 23!” These LDS folks don’t seem to even know that gentile college girls NEVER get married in college and they don’t really start thinking about it until their late twenties.Believe me, a devout Mormon girl who is unmarried by 27 is not that way through choice. It's because something hasn't worked out for her and she's agonizing about what went wrong. All her relatives are agonizing over it too. I have a 45 year old LDS cousin whose geriatric father asks her every day when she's going to get married. Bub, that ship has sailed.In the gentile world, a 27 year old girl has just hit her young professional "sex in the city" stage. Sure, she wants to marry so she can have kids in her thirties, so it's on her mind, but her ship is only starting to leave port. A Mormon 27 year old girl's ship can see the iceberg and she is sending out distress signals frantically.All this desperation comes on the heels of a Church "recommendation" a decade or so ago that LDS teens not date until they are sixteen. (BTW, an LDS Church recommendation is as canonical to the faithful as Yahweh's finger writing on stone tablets was to Moses.) This prohibition has somehow morphed in recent years into trend where kids only go on group-dates before their missions, so these days young LDS men and women aren't really learning to socialize one-on-one like we used to do. My 20 year old nephew reports to me that his first dates with college girls are cold, calculating outings, more like interviews for the "job" of husband. He says he actually gets open verbal feedback from the girls on whether he passed the interview and can move on to the next stage. It's like they have a checklist of criteria that must be met before a second date can be contemplated.Come to think of it, my niece had just such a checklist that she made at age 16 -- it was 67 items long. The guy she eventually married passed muster on 60 of the 67 items, but she initially told him no to first date because he was too old for her checklist.If all this seems very strange to you, it is to both myself (a Jack Mormon) and my sister, their faithful LDS mother. It's a different world than the one we grew up in.But I stray from the topic. Why do LDS kids marry so young? Because there is intense societal, religious, peer and family pressure for them to do so and because sex before marriage is taboo. It's certainly not because they are more "optimistic", more mature, or less picky than their gentile counterparts. If anything they are more picky because they are playing for keeps every time.That's it, in a nutshell. If you want to "see the elephant" as a Mormon, you've got to buy the full price ticket of admission, no fair peeking through holes in the tent.