I’m frankly surprised. Previous studies showed average marriage age for Victorian British women as 18-21 and for men 22-25… of course, still higher than in the Mormon community. Did the Office of National Statistics include nonconformist church records? What else could explain such a dramatic discrepancy?
I find that interesting.
According to statistics for the U.S., the age (the statistics for this use the age of the woman) of first marriage is correlated with the likelihood of marriage disruption (they call it “marriage disruption” because it includes not only those who divorce but also those who simply separate without bothering with a divorce). Basically, the younger you get married, the more likely you are to have a marriage disruption, though it is not a linear relationship; waiting until one is 25 years old seems to get most of the benefit of being older when getting married. See:
There is a bar graph that is figure 19 on page 18 that shows this. There is also more discussion in the text (starting on page 17) and in Table 21 on Page 55.
So, in other words, the lower age of getting married is likely at least a partial explanation of the higher divorce rate than from earlier generations. So it isn’t simply the relative ease of getting a divorce that explains a higher divorce rate, because people who marry older don’t tend to get a divorce as much as those who get married younger, even when they both have equal access to getting a divorce.
The correlation makes a lot of sense to me, as older people are typically more mature and more settled in their ideas about things, so that marrying older, they are more likely to pick someone who is suitable as a lifetime companion, whereas those who marry young may change more as they get a little older, and such changes may make them no longer compatible with their spouse.
The data before 1753 are going to be a little bit suspect, since there was no legal requirement for a marriage ceremony or formal registration of the marriage before the Marriage Act. Often the first record of marriages in parish records before then was at the christening of their first child, which would skew the age up a little.
4 comments
Do we know why the age dropped so low in the 60s?
I’m frankly surprised. Previous studies showed average marriage age for Victorian British women as 18-21 and for men 22-25… of course, still higher than in the Mormon community. Did the Office of National Statistics include nonconformist church records? What else could explain such a dramatic discrepancy?
I find that interesting.
According to statistics for the U.S., the age (the statistics for this use the age of the woman) of first marriage is correlated with the likelihood of marriage disruption (they call it “marriage disruption” because it includes not only those who divorce but also those who simply separate without bothering with a divorce). Basically, the younger you get married, the more likely you are to have a marriage disruption, though it is not a linear relationship; waiting until one is 25 years old seems to get most of the benefit of being older when getting married. See:
[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf)
There is a bar graph that is figure 19 on page 18 that shows this. There is also more discussion in the text (starting on page 17) and in Table 21 on Page 55.
So, in other words, the lower age of getting married is likely at least a partial explanation of the higher divorce rate than from earlier generations. So it isn’t simply the relative ease of getting a divorce that explains a higher divorce rate, because people who marry older don’t tend to get a divorce as much as those who get married younger, even when they both have equal access to getting a divorce.
The correlation makes a lot of sense to me, as older people are typically more mature and more settled in their ideas about things, so that marrying older, they are more likely to pick someone who is suitable as a lifetime companion, whereas those who marry young may change more as they get a little older, and such changes may make them no longer compatible with their spouse.
The data before 1753 are going to be a little bit suspect, since there was no legal requirement for a marriage ceremony or formal registration of the marriage before the Marriage Act. Often the first record of marriages in parish records before then was at the christening of their first child, which would skew the age up a little.
Comments are closed.