Is there a perfect age to wed?…apparently, there is….
Thursday, September 14, 2023.
What’s the most resilient age at which to marry for the first time?
Is there a sweet spot for entering married life for the first time? Is there an age that is statistically correlated with the lowest risk of divorce?
Getting married at between the ages of 28 to 32-year confers the lowest risk of divorce, according to statistics on marriage.
Marriage before reaching your late twenties, or getting married after your early thirties are both correlated with a higher risk of divorce as the end game of the relationship.
The marriages that are the most perilous are between teens, or humans barely into their twenties. relationship dissatisfaction also tends to haunt those humans who get married for the first time after the age of 45.
I love the little nuggets of take-aways from this sort of statistical analysis. For example, if you decide to wait to get married until you are 25, instead of forming an intentional household at 20, for you’ll lower your risk of divorce by half!.
This was a lot of number crunching. This study was based on a national survey of families that included over 9000 humans (ok, 9,213 to be exact)..
Dr. Nick Wolfinger, who analyzed the data, explained his findings:
“Delaying marriage from the teens until the early twenties produces the largest declines in divorce risk, for totally understandable reasons: we’re all changing a lot more from year to year as teenagers than when we’re in our twenties or thirties.
Our parents and friends are likely to disapprove of a teenage marriage, but their feelings probably won’t change much once we hit our mid-twenties.”
It seems that delaying marriage until your late twenties is a sweet spot for survival.
However, a really interesting question is why does getting hitched for the first time in your late thirties or forties risky? Isn’t that being prudent and thoughtful?
Dr Wolfinger mused openly… what does this data indicate?:
“…the kinds of people who wait till their thirties to get married may be the kinds of people who aren’t predisposed toward doing well in their marriages.
For instance, some people seem to be congenitally cantankerous.
Such people naturally have trouble with interpersonal relationships.
Consequently they delay marriage, often because they can’t find anyone willing to marry them.
When they do tie the knot, their marriages are automatically at high risk for divorce.”
Can we look at numbers without wondering about “the kinds of people?” they might be? It might not even be the right question.
I’m struck by all of Dr. Wolfinger’s musings to explain his data.
But one comment he made was a red flag to me that Dr. Wolfinger might be PFA-ing these explanations. (I made this word up just now. It means plucking from the air). I do that sometimes in therapy too…but I digress.
Here’s what he said that bewildered me:
Consequently they delay marriage, often because they can’t find anyone willing to marry them.
I don’t think that comment requires an extensive critique,… do you?
Can researchers simply be a Fair Witness to their data?
The science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein occasionally ventured in sociological fiction.
In the novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein introduced the notion of a Fair Witness.
In Heinlein’s thought experiment, a Fair Witness is “rigorously trained to observe, remember, and report without prejudice, distortion, lapses in memory, or personal involvement.”
The quintessential description of what a Fair Witness does or is can be found on p. 100 of the standard edition of Stranger in a Strange Land:
Anne was on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, “That house on the hilltop – can you see what color they’ve painted it?” Anne looked, then answered. “It’s white on this side.”
Jubal went on to Jill, “You see? It doesn’t occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King’s horses couldn’t force her to commit herself … unless she went there and looked – and even then she wouldn’t assume that it stayed white after she left.”
Another example is found on p. 114:
“Hell’s bells, you wouldn’t testify that the sun had risen if the day was cloudy.” “How could I? Somebody might be supplying artificial light above the cloud layer.”
Fair Witnesses work on a strictly empirical basis
Part of their code, as Heinlein imagines them, is to firmly refuse to make assumptions, offer no explanations or hypothesis, or to allow any of their own their thoughts or notions seep into the gaps in data, or decorate incomplete visual images with the infilling of their own mental doodling.
A fair witness endeavors to perceive what is…without the hobbling filters of social expectation, or approval seeking.
It’s such a human trait to discover the narratives that explain data, but as Dr. Wolfinger freely admits… what he’s offering is pure conjecture. But we celebrate the puzzle solvers and explainer of mysteries. We bestow upon them massive approval and social recognition.
But his analysis clearly demonstrates that humans who wed for the first time in their mid-thirties, forties, and later, are now at greater risk of divorce than are people who marry while in their late twenties.
This is something new. Dr. Wolfinger’s observations have changed what we know about the demographic outcomes of divorce. Dr. Wolfinger’s data needs to be delved into more deeply.
Now I think it’s up to the thought leaders, and soft-skill scholars to sort it all out.
I think Heinlein was on to something. What do you think?
Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
The study was published on the Institute For Family Studies website (Wolfinger, 2015).
