How old were you when you got married? If you look at the statistics, you’ll see that the average age of marriage is generally trending up. People now tend to get married in their early thirties, whereas previous generations usually got married in their 20s or even their teens.
Of course, there are still people getting married in their teens and their twenties today. It’s just not as common. But will the age at which you chose to get married impact your odds of later getting a divorce?
Younger couples have higher divorce odds
Studies have found that couples who get married at a younger age do tend to have higher divorce odds than couples who wait longer. This is one reason why people are often waiting until their 30s. They want to make sure that the relationship is stable and will last. This doesn’t always work, but it does correlate to a higher percentage of successful marriages.
One potential reason for this is simply that young people still have a lot of mental and emotional development ahead of them. For instance, brain development itself doesn’t end until about 25 years old. People are going to change. If they change dramatically, and if they change in very different ways, they may find out that a marriage that made sense when they were 21 no longer makes sense at 29.
Naturally, there is no perfect predictor of divorce, and it can happen to couples at any age. If you believe that your marriage is moving toward divorce, perhaps for some of the reasons noted above, then it’s very important to look into all of your legal options.