Summary

Historical timeline of Joseph Smith's Marriages. The range in green is aligned with real numbers and real distributions,^[1] but is not calculated exactly due to a lack of readily available cross-tabulated data. The distribution of age at first marriage is skew right, which means that ~9.5% of the remaining ~11% of couples were older, not younger. The number of extremely young spouses was very low - comparable to today's numbers: ~1.2% females married younger than 17 and ~2% males married younger than 20. Further, in the 1830's and 1840's, ~45% of all couples were same-age marriages, where the difference in ages was less than two years. Joseph married about 5 years earlier than average (21 vs. 26), and Emma about 2 years earlier than average (22 v 24).^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]}

References for list of wives:

• Brodie, Fawn (1971) w:No Man Knows My History, w:Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 0-679-73054-0
• Compton, Todd (Summer 1996
  date QS:P,+1996-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P4241,Q40720564
  ), “A Trajectory of Plurality: An Overview of Joseph Smith's Thirty-three Plural Wives”, in w:Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought^[1], volume 29, issue 2, archived from the original on 2011-06-13, pages 1–38.
• Compton, Todd (1997) In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith, w:Signature Books, ISBN 1-56085-085-X.
• Smith, George D. (2010) Nauvoo Polygamy: "...but we called it celestial marriage"^[2], 2nd edition, w:Signature Books, ISBN 978-1-56085-207-0, LCCN 2010032062, OCLC 656848353, archived from the original on 2014-12-02.

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1. ↑ Putte and Mtthijs, "Romantic love and marriage: a study of age homogamy in 19th Leuven." online at https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/443657/file/1038487
2. ↑ Bozon, "Women and the Age Gap Between Spouses: An Accepted Dominion?" https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2949134.pdf
3. ↑ Euling et al. "Role of Environmental Factors in the Timing of Puberty". https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/121/Supplement_3/S167
4. ↑ Rolf and Ferrie. "The May-December relationship since 1850: Age homogamy in the U.S." https://paa2008.princeton.edu/papers/80695
5. ↑ Diers. "Historical trends in the age at menarche and menopause". https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pr0.1974.34.3.931
6. ↑ Bras, "The age difference between spouses and reproduction in 19th century Sweden". https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol41/37/41-37.pdf
7. ↑ Hains, "Long term marriage patterns in the United States from Colonial Times to the present". https://www.nber.org/papers/h0080.pdf