Thinking about getting married? How do you know if your marriage will last? You could evaluate a long list of compatibility criteria… but a cheap trick is to look at the age you get married. This number is surprisingly revealing of divorce vulnerability, and not in the way previously thought.
There’s a long-standing notion that people who marry later tend to have more stable marriages. Getting married as a teenager is the most risky, the most predictive of divorce. This makes sense, right? If you’re young, you’re probably financially strapped and uncertain about your professional future; you likely have age-related pressures from family, friends, work, and school; heck, your brain isn’t even fully developed yet. On top of all this, many teenagers are inexperienced navigating relationship challenges. It’s tough to get married when you’re a teenager.
Statistical trends suggest waiting a few years: divorce is 50% less likely for someone who is 25, compared to someone who gets married at age 20. This dramatic decrease has, up until now, been the beginning of a downward slope that kept on decreasing (though not at as fast of a rate) through people’s 20s, 30s, and beyond.
The idea that getting married older is less predictive of divorce also makes sense: it’s likely that couples are more financially stable, have a clearer sense of self and goals, and have been through the dating market enough to know what they really want.
So what’s happening now?
Nicholas Wolfinger, a researcher and professor of sociology, discovered a startling new reality. His recent analysis of data from 2006-2010 in the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) shows that getting married after your mid-30s is actually more risky than getting married in your late 20s. Specifically, the best age to get married appears to be between 28 and 32 years. Before that time, divorce rates are still decreasing, and after that window, they begin to heighten again.
Slate Magazine calls it the “goldilocks theory of marriage.” Get married too early: divorce rates are higher… and now, get married too late, you’re in a similar (if less dramatic) boat.
Why is this? Wolfinger can’t say. But, as far as the pattern goes, he asserts that “its existence is beyond question.” He replicated the finding using data from the 2011-2014 NSFG. The same trend emerged. After 5 years of marriage, teenage couples have a 38% risk of divorce, those in their early twenties are also highly vulnerable (27%), but then there’s a strong decline for couples who marry between ages 25-29 (14%) and ages 30-34 (10%). Yet, once again, the mid-thirties see an uptick in divorce risk. Couples who are first married at 35 or over have a 17% risk of divorce in their first five years of marriage.
Wolfinger controlled for a variety of demographic variables and still found evidence that, in today’s world, marrying before your mid-20s or after your mid-30s is associated with higher rates of divorce. He speculates that self-selection is part of the explanation of today's new reality. These days, he thinks,people who wait until their mid-thirties aren’t generally doing so for financial stability (which is usually established by early 30s) and might simply be less apt to succeed in marriage. Perhaps too, options like cohabitation without marriage, are reducing the pool of marriage-eligible people over 30 who would succeed in committed relationships. His speculation is not without exceptions, but may reflect an overall consideration of individuals whose first marriages occur after 35.
Resources
Want to Avoid Divorce? Wait to Get Married, But Not Too Long
from Psychology Today - Relationships http://ift.tt/20TEjz5
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