;Want to get married and stay married? Don’t rush to get hitched when you’re young — but don’t wait too long, either. Once you’re past your early 30s, the risk of divorce starts to ;creep up ;again, according to new analysis. ;
Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah, ;looked at data ;from the National Survey of Family Growth and found that while the risk of divorce declines steadily from your teens into your late 20s — it starts to ;rise again somewhere in your 30s. ;
Once you reach the age of 32, the odds of getting a divorce increase by 5 percent each year. ;
As Wolfinger breaks it down ;on the Institute For Family Studies blog, “Those who tie the knot after their early thirties are now more likely to divorce than those who marry in their late 20s.” ;
Wolfinger writes that it’s “no mystery” why those who marry as teens face a higher risk of divorce: most of us don’t have the coping skills or maturity to deal with marriage in our teens or early 20s, he suggests — and marrying young correlates with lower educational attainment, which increases the risk for divorce regardless of age. ;
But why does waiting until you’re well into your 30s increase the odds? Shouldn’t you be better equipped to handle the stresses of marriage the older you get? ;
The researcher isn’t entirely sure but suggests it might have something to do with what he calls the “selection effect”: those who wait to wed may be the type of people who just aren’t cut out for marriage. Ouch. ;
“They delay marriage, often because they can’t find anyone willing to marry them,” Wolfinger explains ;in his blog. “When they do tie the knot, their marriages are automatically at high risk for divorce. More generally, perhaps people who marry later face a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony” ;
The Huffington Post reached out to Wolfinger for comment but ;he did not reply by the time of publication. ;
For those of you suddenly feeling like you just. can’t. win ;regardless of when you decide to marry, take heart: This is just a statistical analysis based on general trends and may not reflect your personal experience. And overall, the divorce rate in the U.S. continues to ;drop ;from its peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Phew. ;
For more on Wolfinger’s analysis, head here. ;
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Taken from:
Getting Married Past This Age Increases Your Risk Of Divorce, Research Suggests
