Get Married in Your Late 20s If You’d Rather Not Get Divorced

New York reports:

You are aware, presumably, that couples who are in their teens or very early 20s when they get married have the odds stacked against them, as younger couples have the highest risk of divorce. So it follows that the older you are when you get hitched, the better off your marriage will be – after all, by your 30s, you have a more solid sense of who you are, and you’re likely to be better off financially, too, both of which can help a relationship succeed.

But this is only true up to a point, according to a new analysis of the data: The divorce risk does indeed decline as individuals marry later, but this trend stops in the early 30s. Those who marry in their mid-30s or later are now more likely to divorce than those who marry in their late 20s, says Nicholas H. Wolfinger, a University of Utah psychologist, in a writeup of his new research for the Institute for Family Studies. “My data analysis shows that prior to age 32 or so, each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by 11 percent," Wolfinger writes. "However, after that, the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent per year.”

The odds.