II. LITERATURE REVIEW The practice of early marriage is prevalent in developing countries like Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where annually millions of young girls become the wives of older

It is an undeniable fact that with demographic imbalance and economic crisis among other things, the age of marriage has risen tremendously throughout the world. This study investigates perceptions of married adults in Kuala Lumpur on both positive and negative implications of delayed marriage. The sample consisted of 132 male and 130 female married staff and post-graduate students from three public Universities in Kuala Lumpur. A self-constructed questionnaire with internal consistence reliability coefficient of 0.70 was used to elicit information from respondents using a purposive sampling method. Findings in this article reveal negative perceptions on the positive implications (maturity in marital relationship, quality partner and marital stability) and no gender difference exists in the perceptions of male and female respondents on this. The study also finds positive perceptions on the negative implications of delayed marriage such as infertility, cohabitation/pre-marital sex, psychosocial effect and stress effect. It finds no difference in the perceptions of male and female on negative implications of delayed marriage such as infertility, cohabitation/pre-marital sex, psychosocial effect and stress effect. However, gender difference exists in the perceptions on the negative effect of delayed marriage on children (producing delinquent children). Negative implications are detrimental to the particular individuals and the society. By paying less attention to it, the aftermath effect may be worse than that of early marriage. In this sense, there should be a continual sensitization of people on the negative implications of delayed marriage.