Reporting on a correlation that was actually discovered several years ago, Joanna Rothkopf of Jezebel.com says what I've often thought but ne'er so well expressed, and which is rarely expressed at all, but deserves serious thought:
"But for real, how seriously are we supposed to take this? Studies keep claiming bullshit indicators are the keys to lasting marriages, including the price of the engagement ring (don’tspend between $2,000-4,000), amount of individual pre-marriage wealth, the size and price of the wedding and the presence of the honeymoon. So, I don’t know, just live your life."
The eminent marital statistician Nicholas Wolfinger describes what sound like very dramatic correlations between divorce and one's age at marriage:
“My 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,” he writes. “However, after that the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent per year.” How come? Wolfinger isn't sure. But controlling the data for demographic and personal characteristics such as race, education, religion, sexual history, family background, or the size of the cities survey takers lived in didn't change the results, suggesting none of those factors could explain it. Ultimately, the professor suspects that there's a lot of self-selection at play: The sorts of people who wait a very long time to say "I do" just might not really be the marrying types, whether they realize it or not. Or, even if they are, their dating pool might have been whittled down to people who aren't.
Study: People Who Get Married After 32 Are More Likely To Get Divorced
By Joanna Rothkopf on Jezebel.com, 7/16/15
Based on:
- " Want to Avoid Divorce? Wait to Get Married, But Not Too Long" by @NickWolfinger on Family-Studies.org July 16, 2015
- " The Goldilocks Theory of Marriage" by Jordan Weissmann on Slate.com
- "Age at marriage and marital instability: revisiting the Becker–Landes–Michael hypothesis" by Evelyn L. Lehrer in the Journal of Population Economics, April 2008, Volume 21, Issue 2, pp 463-484, also dated 01 Sep 2006
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