By The Law Offices of Ronald H. Kauffman of Ronald H. Kauffman, P.A. posted in Marriage on Tuesday, July 28, 2015.
This post asks if there is a right time to marry. Is it true that if you get married too early or too late, the chances are you’ll end up in divorce court? One professor says the late 20s and early 30s are perfect.
I’ve written about the right time to divorce. But is there a right time to marry? Relying on data from the 2006-2010 National Survey of Family Growth, a professor from Utah states that the age of marriage now has a U-shaped relationship to divorce risk.
The odds of divorce decline as you age from your teenage years through your late twenties and early thirties. Then, the chances of divorce go up again as you move into your late thirties and early forties.
This is a marked departure from the way people used to think of it, when the relationship was relatively linear: the older you are when you first marry, the lower the odds of divorce.
The new study suggests that people should get married between the ages of 28 and 32 if they don’t want to get divorced, at least in the first five years.
These are just statistics, so do not accept these figures as your own wedding or engagement announcement gets sent out. There are many reasons why starting a marriage in your late 20s or early 30s makes sense:
people are old enough to understand if they really get along with someone or are just blinded by hormones. They’ve already made significant life choices and taken on some responsibilities. And they may be just financially solvent enough to be able to contemplate supporting someone should the need arise.
Others sociologists say the perfect age to get married if you don’t want to get divorced is 45 to 49, which, is why people shouldn’t make life decisions based on statistical analyses on the Internet.
The new study can be found here.