A couple getting married | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
It’s not uncommon to be apprehensive about getting married. For some, it’s a general fear of commitment — or getting taken to the cleaners when things don’t work out. For others, particularly in the millennial generation, things are a bit more complicated than that, and a lot of those marriage complications have to do with the economy.
Some people jump right into marriage soon after high school at a relatively young age. That’s typically something associated with older generations, as trends have pointed to waiting longer and longer as the years have gone by. Today, the millennial generation is getting married later than ever, and a lot of it has to do with large amounts of debt and a bleak job market that is slowly improving.
What’s interesting about that is that it may have actually been playing into many couples’ favor to wait a bit to get married. After all, a more secure financial household, along with more established careers and goals is sure to help any couple avoid certain pitfalls of marriage. And studies have shown that couples that do wait to get married, even into their 30s, have a lower rate of divorce.
Until now.
There’s a new batch of research showing that those divorce rates may be on a parabolic curve — that is, there is a sweet-spot in terms of what age you should get married. Divorce rates decline until a certain age, but after that age, they start to go up again. That is what Nicholas Wolfinger of The Institute for Family Studies at the University of Utah has found by digging through decades’ worth of data.
