The average American woman is nearly 29 years old at her first marriage, and the average man is 30. One generation ago, in 1990, the median age was 23 for women and 26 for men.
Plenty of commentators greet this as unmitigated progress. It means more economic equality because women have the chance to build their careers. It means fewer abusive relationships because it indicates fewer women are getting married out of necessity. The assumption is that people more mature when they wed are more likely to choose wisely and have the patience and prudence needed to make a marriage and family work.
But this good-news-of-late-marriages story is overblown.
Yes, there are correlations between later marriages and good outcomes. Still, exceptions to those rules suggest a much more complicated causality than the simple age-means-maturity-means-marital-success story offered by the average commentator.
Religious people in the United States get married earlier than the irreligious, and religious people get divorced less. This seems to buck the pattern. Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies dug into this phenomenon and found one likely yet overlooked causal mechanism: cohabitation.
“One reason that religious marriages in America may be more stable is that religion reduces young adults’ odds of cohabiting prior to marriage, even though it increases their likelihood of marrying at a relatively young age,” they wrote.
This week in the Wall Street Journal, the two explained: “In fact, women who married between 22 and 30, without first living together, had some of the lowest rates of divorce … By contrast, for the approximately 70% of women in our sample who cohabited with one or more partners prior to marriage, the conventional wisdom held. For them, waiting until around 30 was linked to a lower risk of divorce.”
So perhaps waiting longer to get married helps you stay married, but this may be true only for those who live together before marrying.
Maybe a mock marriage — shared home, shared bills, shared bed, all without a lifelong commitment — arrests a couple’s development, slowing down the maturity process. This would explain why women who lived with a boyfriend were “15% more likely to get divorced,” according to Wilcox and Stone.
Alternatively, maybe living in a mock marriage makes the actual marriage less momentous and thus less seemingly permanent — a negative effect slowly diminished when one’s middle age is approaching and one stops imagining the endless options of alternative mates.
There is a ton more to research and learn, but for now, researchers should look into the effect that religiosity and shacking up have on marriage. Maybe if we increase one and reduce the other, people can have more early and successful marriages, which would be key to reversing our current Baby Bust.
