Finding Yourself Before Marriage

This morning one of my friends posted an article entitled "Married at 19: Worth Every 'Lost Experience,'" and of course I had to read it. The author talked about the benefits of marrying young, such as growing together with her spouse, learning sacrifice and selflessness, and having a built-in support system during the difficult developing years of her early twenties. Naturally, as comes with posting your opinion in cyber space, the onslaught of opposing viewpoints followed. One person in her late twenties mentioned the financial problems she was having and how being connected to another person would've compounded that into financial disaster. Another man expressed his distaste for the "throwback post" to the 1950's, and cited that one in two people married right out of high school will divorce. He mentioned the ability to have an education, be more financially secure and being able to "find yourself" as great benefits to post-poning marriage.

It's no secret that the average age of marriage has been steadily increasing for the last decade, and each of the reasons mentioned have been accepted as explanations of why it should continue. But are they really? Can the author of the article really be happy without experiencing the freedom of singlehood? Is it possible to beat the odds? And more importantly, are things such as greater financial security, education and life experience actually essential to a happy marriage?

In order to figure it out, we only need to ask one question which can provide us several answers - Was the early-marriage hater right? Do those married out of high school really have higher divorce rates? Rather than throw around randomly Googled statistics, let's look at a real graph from a real peer-reviewed, published article.

Heaton, T. B. (2002). Factors Contributing to Increasing Marital Stability in the United States. Journal of Family Issues

For those non-statisticians, what we're seeing on the left of this graph is an 80% chance of divorce for persons married at the age of 15 and younger - shocker, right? However, once we hit 18-20 we've dropped to about 40% - so our hater wasn't too far off. By the time we get to age 21 though, it's gone almost down to 20% and we see it on a steady decline from there. But honestly, the statistical significance of a divorce rate moving from 22% - 18% in this particular data set is pretty much nothing.

So that was only one study, no big deal right? Actually, Norval D. Glenn (kind of a sociological legend) from the University of Texas found the same exact findings in 5 different data sets from around the United States. That's the statistical equivalent of "What now suckas?!"

So hater was kind of right. But the bigger question here is: is stability the only thing you're looking for in a marriage? Because yeah, if you want a better chance of staying married, wait until at least 21, but if you want a happy marriage with great sex, you might want to start looking at the age of 20 and hope you get to where you're going before 25. Check it out.

The Glenn data sets also showed a curvilinear relationship between age of marriage and marital satisfaction. This means that as age of marriage goes up, satisfaction in marriage starts to go up until it plateaus at 20, and then takes a dive again at age 25. In a follow up study done by researchers at Brigham Young University they found that couples married after age 24 displayed lower levels of effective communication and significantly lower levels of sexual satisfaction.

Now, if you were married after 25, or are currently 25 and unmarried don't start freaking out on me, there are several factors that contribute to these trends, and unlike our hater friend, I won't tell you that statistics determine your fate. I'll just make you read another post on what you can do to not become a statistic. But I digress...

The greatest trend that we're seeing in why marriages from 22-25 have higher satisfaction is actually what was said in the Married at 19 article - couples are able to grow together. Despite having more life experience, education, greater income, etc., research is finding that this process of waiting to "finding yourself" makes the concept of you very solid. Marriage requires flexibility, sacrifice and selflessness. When young adults spend more time becoming independent, the outcome is a more difficult process of bringing two people together in a relationship.

So what is the right age for marriage? Honestly, social science will probably always refuse to answer that questions, but I'm going to side with Norval himself on this one when he says, "it would be premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22-25. However, the findings do suggest that most persons have little or nothing to gain in the way of marital success by deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid-twenties."