Are you considering getting married? How do you know if yourweddingwill last? You can assess a long list of compatibility criteria, or you can simply consider how old you are. Your age when you get married is surprisingly revealingpartingvulnerability, but not in the way experts previously thought.
There has long been the idea that people who marry later in life tend to have a more stable marriage. According to this line of thought, getting married as a teenager is the riskiest and most predictable form of divorce. Makes sense, right? If you're young, you're probably financially strapped and unsure about your professional future; you are likely experiencing age-related pressures from family, friends, work and school. Your brain isn't even fully developed yet. Moreover, manyteenagersare inexperienced when it comes to navigating challenges. It's just hard to get married when you're very young.
Statistical trends suggest it's best to wait a few years: divorce is 50% less likely for someone who is 25 years old when he or she marries, compared to someone who marries at age 20. So far, this dramatic decline has been observed. as the beginning of a downward trend that continues to decline, albeit at a slightly slower pace, throughout the 1920s, 1930s and beyond.
The idea that getting married older is less predictive of divorce also makes sense: couples are likely to be more financially stable, have a clearer view of themselves andgoal, and spent enough time on itdatato know what they really want.
What happens now?
Sociological researcher Nicholas Wolfinger has discovered a surprising new reality: His latest analysis of data from 2006 to 2010 in the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) shows that getting marriedafter your mid-thirtiesis actuallyriskierthen get married in your late twenties - and that thebestthe age of marriage seems to be between 28 and 32 years. Before this age category, the number of divorces continues to decline; after that window they start climbing again.
Slatemagazine calls these new findings “Goldilocks theory of marriage“Getting married too early? The divorce rate is higher. Getting married too late? You're in a similar (although slightly less dramatic) boat.
Why is it? Wolfinger cannot say for sure. But as for the pattern, he claims that "its existence is beyond doubt." When he repeated the finding using data from the 2011-2014 NSFG, the same trend emerged. After five years of marriage, couples who married as teenagers have a 38% risk of divorce; People in their early twenties are also very vulnerable (27%), but there is a sharp decline for couples who marry between the ages of 25 and 29 (14%) and between the ages of 30 and 34 (10%). Once again, couples who married in their mid-30s saw an increase in their divorce risk: Couples who married for the first time at age 35 or older had a 17% risk of divorce during the first five years of their marriage.
Wolfinger controlled for a number of demographic variables and still found evidence that getting married before your mid-20s or after your mid-30s is associated with higher divorce rates in today's world. He speculates that self-selection is part of the explanation for this new reality: People today who wait until their mid-30s to get married generally don't marry for financial stability—which usually comes about in their early 30s—and may simply be less eligible. to succeed in marriage. And perhaps options like unmarried cohabitation narrow the pool of marriageable people over 30 who would succeed in a committed relationship. Wolfinger's speculations are not without exception, but may reflect a trend among people whose first marriage occurs after age 35.
