When I got Married...

All I can say is that my life is pretty plain,
I like watching the puddles gather rain.
And all I can do is just pour some tea for two,
and speak my point of view.
But it's not sane, It's not sane.

~Blind Melon

First off, I am not married, so obviously this is not about when I got married. Today I am going to look a little bit at the statistics behind the claim that the average marriage age is rising. In doing this, I am going to fill in the blank "When I got married _______." In order to get this to a point where I felt it was factual and summarized my claims accurately I had to make this post a bit longer. This is not an attempt at a justification for my current status, but rather an examination of the perceptions of a situation.

I sometimes joke that the average marriage age is rising....and has been since the neolithic era.

Thurg at his wedding.

But that actually is not true. Let me explain.

Here is a link to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. This gives median marriage age data. Those of you who understand basic probability distributions will understand why the median age is perhaps more useful than the mean (The median helps us understand the distribution in terms of percentiles instead of averages, hence we know the value in the distribution below which half the population lies). I will reference the following graph several times (This is a smaller version of the graph found under the link. This way if you are on a phone you can possibly view the graph a bit more easily):

Are marriage rates declining? Yes. But how severely? Note that there was a major dip in the census data post WWII (1950, 1960, 1970s). People getting married in that era currently control a significant proportion of the public pulpit on marriage. Keep that in mind. 

According to the work of the well know (in the field) economics professor Nicholas F.R Crafts of the University of Warwick (link here), all but two of the 43 English counties had higher median marriage ages for women in 1861 than the median marriage age for women in the U.S. in 1910. Starting in 1890 (Which is as far back as my data goes), median marriage age for women in the U.S. trended overall downward for the next 60 years. It took until 1970 (That is in the 20th century) for the median marriage age of women in the U.S. to surpass the lowest recorded median age (by county) in England in 1861. What does this mean? It means that women in 1950, 1960 and 1970s were seemingly getting married at ages unprecedented for over a century. 

Remember that the 1860s were a time were it was not at all unusual to see a girl get married at ages that are not even legal without parental consent these days. Yet the median marriage age of women was higher in every county of England in 1861 than it was in the United States 100 years later. 

I am going to be sloppy and go out on a limb: We would also see a similar phenomenon with men. I am going to ignore the fact that married couples in the 19th century usually had a larger age difference than we are used to these days. If we factor that in, the results for men would be even more pronounced. Conclusion, the post WWII generation got married at ages so low we had not seen them for nearly 100 years prior. 

By the way, average life expectancy rose by 30 years over that same century time span. Rather curious, is it not? (Yes, married men live longer. But the effect is minimal at best. This rise in life expectancy cannot be attributed to getting married at a younger age. As noble as that is of course.) 

Let me raise my hand here and admit that in 1860, marriage ages for women in the U.S. were lower than in England. Professor J. David Hacker of the University of Minnesota estimates in this paper that it was roughly 2 to 3 years lower in the U.S. However, as the U.S. modernized to the level of England, marriage ages also quickly rose to those of England.* This is reflected in the U.S. Census data. As with many questions in social science, we have to pick between two less than ideal alternatives. We can either use statistics from a more modernized country and extrapolate to the U.S., or we can use 19th century statistics from a country based on rustic agrarianism. We can pair data sets from countries modern among their contemporaries, or we can pair data sets from the same country, albeit a country which saw a rather rapid modernization movement at the end of the 19th century. In all, this shows that attempts to use social statistics from bygone eras to create policy platforms for the modern era will always require leaving some hole unfilled.   

So, to fill in the blank, "traditional America" (Meaning those born in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s) can say "When I got married, I was more likely than not married at a younger age than someone 100 years older than me." Probabilistically, that is what the median marriage age tells us. Not until 1980 (120 years later) did the median marriage age in the U.S. surpass that of the 1860s in England. So in other words, my grandparents' generation got married younger than any other generation that has ever been alive at the same time they were.

Sit up and read this carefully, because even well respected sources such as twentysomethingmarriage.org** sometimes overlook this. Marriage did not start in 1950. In this article twentysomethingmarriage.org makes a sloppy (or sly) mistake by cutting off their graph at 1947. This allows them to "show" that marriage ages are on the rise, but lead the uninformed reader to assume that marriage ages have always been on the rise. But go back and look at the U.S. Census data. Surprise! Marriage was a thing before 1947. And the 1950 census had the lowest median marriage age on record, a record which started 60 years prior with a median marriage age that was 3 years higher. Again, just because you read it in the ultra conservative "Family" section of your ward newsletter/local paper does not make it true.

Now let me end by fully acknowledging that currently the average (and presumably the median) marriage age is as high as probably it has been for a very long time (Ignore some of those people in the Bible that got married at age 439 or whatever). The percentage of men in the U.S. never married at age 35 is about 1.8% higher than it was 100 years ago. Yes, fewer men are getting married. But the rates are not nearly as severe as some would have you believe.  

Furthermore, I just have not seen good evidence that it actually matters what age someone gets married at (within reason). Some people refute this by talking about their early struggles in marriage at age T minus 20 years old and how it really brought them closer together as a couple. Great! I agree that working through difficulty can be positive for your marriage. But how in the world does that mean I will have an unsuccessful marriage if I get married at a later age?*** Note that having to work at your marriage is a fact of life. That is true whether you are 20, 30, or 100.  I am not trying to belittle those of you who did get married young. But my story has never been your story.  And that is true even when I was a small child.

Sadly, just because it is true does not mean people will believe it. And the microphone does not shut off when someone misinformed gets up to speak. 

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*To quote from the paper: "Indirect evidence suggests that the age of first marriage in the United States began to rise sometime in the eighteenth century and continued to increase slowly in the nineteenth century, peaking around the turn of the twentieth century." Hence people who got married from the 1940s to 1960s in the U.S. were actually a low point in the rise and fall of marriage age. This paints a slightly different picture than many would have you believe. If you are feeling really gumptious, read the whole paper. It is very eye opening and is amazingly accurate in establishing that rising marriage age is systemic to a rapidly devolving society. (That is to say, the claim that a rising median marriage age is caused by unmarried people refusing to take extant marital opportunities is not well founded).

**Let me say though that this site is a must read if you want to speak in an educated way about marriage and singleism. If you seek to preach about singles of my demographic, this site is pretty much the canon. It does an excellent job of bringing in legitimate and respected sources from both sides of the debate. This "bipartisanship" results in one of the very few moderate commentaries on marriage. The writers actually get social science and do not resort to "back in my day" finger pointing, nor do they fancy themselves qualified to speak for "The Brethren." A well regarded member of the Church actually writes for these people by the way.


**There is some evidence that getting married in one's thirties can be correlated with lower marital quality. However, this same research makes explicit note of the fact that such claims differ "significantly" when blocking by those who "were religious and those who weren't." And as with many studies in social science, there always are two sides to the story. The article from twentysomethingmarriage.org that I cited ends by saying "In general, couples who wait till their midtwenties or later enjoy more maturity and financial security, both factors that make it easier to sustain a lifelong marriage." If you fall outside of this category of course you can still have a quality marriage. But the point is that even moderately conservative social scientists (i.e. people who do actual research instead of just polling their freshman marriage prep class) indicate that as long as you get married at a reasonable age, you can have a successful marriage.