His data analysis shows that prior to age 32 or so, each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by 11 percent.
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Looking back at data from the 1990s, Mr Wolfinger noted that couples who waited until they were older before committing to marriage were at a much lower risk of divorce than those who jumped the gun and decided to Wednesday at an early age.
‘However, after that the odds of divorce increase by 5 per cent per year.’. He considered data that was collected from 2006-2010 from the National Survey of Family Growth. The post appeared in the Family Studies blog, a product of the Institute for Family Studies.
Wolfinger says this trend seems to be relatively new, since a previous study done with data from 2002 showed that the divorce rate of people who got married after 30 was flattening out instead of dropping, so it looks like the previously held belief that if you wait longer to get married, you’ll have a better marriage might be falling and Wolfinger isn’t sure as to why that is.
“To the best of my knowledge, it is only recently that marraige of thirty-something started to incur a higher divorce risk“, Wolfinger said. And overall, the divorce rate in the USA continues to drop from its peak in the late 1970s And early 1980s. “More generally, perhaps people who marry later face a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony”.
“The greater divorce risk of younger couples makes a few intuitive sense – in your teens and early 20s, you’re still figuring out who you are and what you want out of life”, Christopher Ingraham explained for The Washington Post.
But the important thing, for Wolfinger, is that “we do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that people who marry in their thirties are now at greater risk of divorce than are people who Wednesday in their late twenties”.
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In the modern day, more people wait until they are older before marrying, be it because they want to commit to their careers, or because they are eager to save some money before splashing out on a big ceremony. “There’s no one-size-fits-all advice that dictates when you should or shouldn’t expect to find the love of your life”.
