I recently found a survey conducted by a website called overflow.solutions. In that survey they mapped out various marital statuses based on age across the population in the US. There are some interesting conclusions to draw from the numbers. First, it is generally informative to see the trending of people who are married, divorced and never married as their age increases. Perhaps its not surprising as marriage should be something that is reserved to a more mature part of one's life. That doesn't necessarily mean that everyone should wait, but I do think it can help increase the chances of a longer lasting marriage. The chart here seems to agree with that assertion. Second, it does seem that the ultimate age for being married is 50. I have no idea if that is significant or not, but I find it interesting. Third, the divorce numbers are not nearly as high as I thought they would be. They also peak at age 50. Likely since there are more married couples at that age, it stands to reason you would see more divorce. However, the percentages of divorced people vs married people is pretty low. I believe that is a good sign for the institution of marriage and our society as a whole.
The idea of marriage has changed so much over the years, so I think that could be a big reason for the seeming health of marriage in the US today. People seem to wait longer now to get married as societal norms have been altered by a number of factors. I believe that is a good thing. You change so much in your 20's and even early 30's. Waiting until you are a little more mature and have figured out some things in your life is not a bad thing. More women work full time then ever before and I think in general younger generations are not as eager to have children right away. These are personal views on my part and not backed by any real research I have come across, but I would bet they are not far off from reasonable.
It is nice to see that many people still view marriage as an important life event. I do think that stability in a relationship is critically important and while marriage is not the end of the discussion in terms of achieving stability, I do think that it is an important commitment to be made that establishes one's intent to make the relationship work through all of the good and the bad that life will inevitably throw at you. It takes a lot of work to make a marriage successful. Without that commitment it would not be possible.
An interesting note personally for me is that I fall into a category, widowed, that is extremely small for my age group. Not as small as for the 30 year old decade, but nonetheless a very tiny percentage of the total numbers involved in the survey. Only 27k individuals are widowed out of the total 3,858,832 people at the age of 41 in this survey. That is kind of crazy to think about. I don't know if I ever thought about how rare it is. Not that this would be a group anyone would want to fall into, but it is a little eye opening to see my marital status in such a minority.
The link to the survey results is below. Please take a look and post comments if you have your own ideas.
Marital Status by Age in the US
UPDATE: July 20, 2017
I recently found an article with more data concerning how people are trending towards marriage later in life (26-30) and divorce is much more common these days (duh). Take a look and let me know your thoughts.
Marrying Later, Staying Single Longer
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