Conclusion
Our marriage laws, specifically those setting down minimum ages at which marriages are permissible in different states, can be rather easily graphed as a pseudo-mathematical visualization of these laws. Mathematically, of course, such a graph means absolutely nothing; interpretatively, however, these "minimum marriage laws" produce a crooked line, zigzagging with a tug-of-war uncertainty between the number 13 (the age at which a girl may marry in New Hampshire, provided she has parental and Court's consent) and the number 21 (the age at which a couple may marry in any state and without anyone's consent but each other's). Any marriage between a couple whose ages meet the minimum age requirement of any particular state in which they are residing is considered thereby to be legal in that state; in the adjacent state, on the other hand, their marriage may not be legal, thereby slipping into what is colloquially known as a "jail-bait" situation.
The five narratives that have been presented in this book bared the bones, so to speak, of such potential jail-bait marriages, revealing less the legal or illegal side of the situation than the psychological difficulties inherent to marriages in which one of the partners is considerably younger than the other. The impression obtained from these narratives, if carefully analyzed, will reveal that such marriages work for some of the people some of the time, especially if they put a great deal of effort (emotional and psychological) into them.
The most interesting question that these same narratives answer, however, is why age-mismatched couples struggle against all odds-to make their marriages work. Whether the struggle is worth the sorrow, the pleasure, and the pain is for the reader to decide.