According to a study presented by Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah, the best time for you to get married is between the ages of 28 and 32.
Though everyone finds the right time to marry or re-marry according to their own lifestyle, their future spouse and their future plans, Wolfinger’s study published by the Institute of Family Studies suggest that couples who wait until between the ages of 28 and 32 are less likely to face divorce in the following years.
“The odds of divorce decline as you age from your teenage years through your late twenties and early thirties,” Wolfinger writes of his findings based on the 2006-2010 and the 2011-2013 National Surveys of Family Growth. “Thereafter, the chances of divorce go up again as you move into your late thirties and early forties.”
It seems that last year’s couples got the hint even before these new numbers came to light, as the studies coincide with what we’ve found in the 2014 Real Weddings Survey at TheKnot.com. The survey, which gathered responses from nearly 16,000 US brides from various backgrounds married between January 1 and December 31, 2014, shows that in 2014 the average marrying age for brides was 29, while grooms were a little older at age 31.
So why does Wolfinger believe that the chance for divorce increases by about 5% for every year after age 32? “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,” Wolfinger writes. Or perhaps, those seeking marriage aren’t “predisposed toward doing well in their marriages” themselves, he theorizes. Hmm…
Whatever the conclusions Wolfinger has drawn with his “Goldilocks theory,” other sociologists are finding different numbers for the golden age of marriage. Phillip Cohen of the University of Maryland utilized a different set of data from the same American Community Survey that Wolfinger used and found that ages 45 to 49 were ideal for couples hoping to marry and avoid divorce, though Wolfinger tried to discredit this study.
When it comes down to it, divorce rates and statistics are extremely difficult to gather. However, in all the studies, including our own findings with TheKnot’s brides in 2014, it seems that waiting to get married is a wise and popular choice for newlyweds. We’ll leave it up to you to decide.
