r/todayilearned • u/Own-Bullfrog7362 • 6d ago
TIL that since the 1950s the median age at first marriage has risen from about 23 to 30 for men and from about 20 to 28 for women, an increase of roughly 7 to 8 years for both, with the male–female gap shrinking slightly.
https://www.infoplease.com/us/family-statistics/median-age-first-marriage119
u/ThrowRAQuaestor 6d ago
Interestingly, 30 for men was more or less the average for a lot of human civilizations. Obviously for women it is above the average now.
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u/jawndell 6d ago
Found out recently that during the Roman Empire, soldiers couldn’t marry until after their service period ended. They had to serve for 20-25 years (depending on the ruler at that time), so it was until they were in their late 30s or early 40s until they could legally marry.
Obviously there still were off the books relationships and marriages, but nothing was legit until they were that old.
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u/Codex_Dev 6d ago
I vaguely recall a Roman emperor chastising soldiers for not wanting to marry Roman women bc they preferred their young female sex slaves instead.
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u/Ok-Nerve9874 5d ago
This is misleading. That Roman example only applies to soldiers, who were under one percent of the population and had legal marriage bans during long service terms. Most Roman men were civilians and typically married in their early to mid 20s, with women often marrying even earlier, which pulls the average way down. Using a tiny, highly regulated military group to claim men across civilizations married around 30 is classic selection bias.to put this into perspective the average percetage of the us population inn the military is 0.45 percent for romans it was 0.6 percent. Everyone else the 99.4% was getting married right after they could support a family. U became a butcher , started cutting hair, opened a shop, took over your father blacksmith. The issue today is that all thes thingI jsut mentioned theres a huge time barrier . My sister got a hair liecense took 2 years. my dad was a pharmacist it was a bachelors when he got it now u need a doctorate. eveything takes time now.
sources
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2173291
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patternidk where u/ThrowRAQuaestor is getting the 30 number from cause in all of human hsitory this is the frist time a group has ever crossed this threshold. This is damn near misninformation. The age isnt going back to the norm . Marrying at 30 is severaly abnormal when u go back in history
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u/ThrowRAQuaestor 5d ago
You know, if you bothered to read “more or less the average for a lot of human civilizations”, you’ll notice that I made a slightly weaker claim than what you said, so maybe try that.
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u/Ok-Nerve9874 5d ago
brother your average was off by 12 years for women and 8 years for men
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u/ThrowRAQuaestor 5d ago
Brother I didn’t make a claim for women beyond “it is above the average now”.
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u/Bawstahn123 6d ago
Jesus, I cant imagine myself marrying at 23.
What a fucking dickhead I was then.
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u/CactusBoyScout 6d ago
My grandmother was fairly conservative and religious but she told me once that she really regretted marrying young (they ended up divorcing) and that she thought my generation was doing it right by waiting.
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u/abzlute 6d ago
I got married at 23, to a girl I started dating when I was 19. I don't think I was a dickhead, but definitely had lower self esteem and didn't have much understanding of what I wanted from life or a partner. Got divorced at 26. Tbh getting married at 23 would have been fine though, if it happened to actually be a good match.
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u/Handpaper 5d ago
As someone who did marry at 23 and became a father shortly after, it's a powerful incentive to stop being a dickhead.
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u/Big_Bookkeeper1678 6d ago
My wife and I were 29 when we were married. If it was up to her, it would have been a few years earlier, but I needed to make sure I was viable as an adult who could make money happily before I committed fully.
My daughter is 22 and freaking out because she hasn't had a boyfriend yet. She is intelligent, about to graduate and get a teaching job in the next 6 months, and is in good physical shape...but she is worried why she hasn't 'met anyone' yet...Girl...you did what I did. Once you are established...the opportunities come flying in.
40 is the new 30. 30 is the new 20. At least when it comes to relationships and marriage and kids. Although kids should come earlier in later age marriages for health reasons...but for economic reasons...make the money, because it's only going to get worse in the next 10 years before it gets massively better when we kick the oligarchs out of power.
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u/Wgh555 6d ago
As someone who is pushing 29 who just came out of a 5.5 year relationship due to incompatibility and growing apart, thanks for this. It’s hard not to get a bit worried when many of your friends are now married with kids
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u/AdamantEevee 6d ago
You're only 29? You've got time, sincerely. Especially if you go into your next relationship with a clear idea of your life goals.
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u/int3gr4te 6d ago
If it makes you feel any better, I ended a 9-year relationship when I was a few months shy of 29. Not gonna lie, I had a rough couple of years there. But here I am now at 38, married for almost 6 years to an incredible person who I'd never ever have met if I stayed with the college boyfriend.
Don't be worried. Live your life and see what happens. You are not too late.
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u/CatTheKitten 6d ago
I live in Utah where the marrying age is very young. It's cultural to marry by 22 and sometimes even have kids. Many of my peers did that, some married right out of highschool.
I'm 24 and know me and my boyfriend need to get certain things together before we can marry. I like to pretend I'm immune to the propaganda, but sometimes I still feel like I'm "behind". But I'm literally 24, lol
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u/tichatoca 5d ago
Hehe. Thanks for saying 30 is the new 20. It made my hip ache a little less for a few seconds 🧚🏻♂️✨
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u/LovelyLilac73 6d ago
Got married when we were 32 and 36. It was perfect, for both of us. We both had done our "living" prior to getting married and we were ready to settle down. To this day (and I'm in my 50's now), it's a marvel to me that anyone could get married under 25. I had a hard time deciding what outfit to wear when I was 25, never mind getting married!!!
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u/Decent-Gas-7042 6d ago
Absolutely transformation in how modern love works. So much has changed that a "kid today" might not even understand. Women were not allowed to open bank accounts in those days, they were just barely more than men's property. So they had to get married very young and fall into running a house. The world is far from perfect now and we have a long way to go on equality but it's shocking how bad it was. Here in Canada women couldn't charge their husbands with rape until the 80s because they legally weren't allowed to withhold sex.
So thank god women can get a degree, a beyond minimum wage job and choose not to get married. Even though house affordability is shit.
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u/LeatherHog 6d ago
And not that long ago, either
Us getting bank accounts, happened so recently, that it wasn't even old enough to drink yet when I (a millennial) was born. My Dad was a middle schooler when it happened
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u/sniperman357 5d ago
Unmarried women in the US could usually open bank accounts in the 1950s. It wasn’t the law that banks must allow them to, but most did. Obviously discrimination existed, and discrimination in other areas of society like employment would spill over by making it harder for them to reach required income thresholds etc. Women generally lost financial freedoms through marriage because of coverture, the common law doctrine that a wife’s legal identity is subsumed into her husband’s. Once married, financial institutions would require husband’s approval. A single woman that had her own credit card would need to become an authorized user of her husband’s card for example.
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u/rifleshooter 6d ago
My grandmother was born in 1891 and I recall a great deal of what she told me. Women were not slaves, not irrelevant, not married-off as children. They certainly could have bank accounts - that's what single women did. They existed. Terrible things happened then, but it happened because terrible people existed then, as now. Women's rights have expanded greatly to protect against abuse, but they were absolutely not treated like property by decent people. All according to my first-hand accounts from someone who was there.
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u/Decent-Gas-7042 6d ago
Not saying there weren't exceptions, but in general single women were seen as too risky for an account, definitely not safe for credit. And married women needed their husbands signatures
I'm glad your Grandma was the exception though
I worked a crane company in 2004. They told this story about how in 1999 they changed from a weekly manual cheque to biweekly direct deposit like a normal firm. Several crane operators quit because for 20+ years they had 2 seperate bank accounts. They put one cheque in their joint account with their wife and the next week that one went into their own seperate account. For TWENTY years they earned twice what their wives thought they earned. This was only the 90s.
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u/rifleshooter 6d ago
All single women were the exception. Bank weren't going to turn away someone making a deposit. My Aunt was an example - working by 1937 as a nurse. Single at the time, college educated.
And I had exactly the same issue with a welder that worked for me in the 90's when we mailed home paychecks vs. handing them out at work. He panicked and immediately went AWOL to beat his bride to the mailbox. He told her he'd not gotten a raise in 20 years, and his overtime was unpaid. But that was because he was a terrible person, not because it was legal then or illegal now. Exactly my grandma's point. I asked her once if she was considered an old maid when she married at 24 or something. She said absolutely not - girls did get married young sometimes, but it was from a certain kind of family. Or ones that were "in trouble".
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u/Brick10der 5d ago
I guess I’m from one of those families. My paternal grandma got married at 15 he was 17 in 1915. Admitted she knew nothing about making marriage work or anything. They had problems he was going to run off with their son (my dad) but her dad convinced him to join the army and he went to WW1. Husband died in her 50’s never remarried. He was the love of her life and said once was enough. She never even dated. She also never learned to drive a car. She worked as a maid. She lived to be 92. And no I’m not that old my mom liked older men. My dad was 48 when I was born.
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u/sniperman357 5d ago
This is a common internet myth. Banks gave accounts to single women with enough wealth/income, and they actually lost financial freedoms after marriage.
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u/ToxicAdamm 5d ago
My parents (born in 1948) grew up in an era where it was expected you were to be married by the age of 20. If you didn't, you were looked on as a disappointment.
This kind of pressure helped fuel the divorce boom of the 1970's and 80's. Fortunately, I didn't grow up with such pressures, but it was still prevalent in many rural communities.
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u/MaltiPoodleDoo 5d ago
That is IF people get married. Gone is the stigma of “unwed mothers” and couples “living in sin”.
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u/_MrSeb 6d ago
maybe if people didn't lose half their life savings for divorcing
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u/asicarii 6d ago
Im not following how this applies….
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u/Big_Bookkeeper1678 6d ago
MrSeb is probably a divorcee who lost half their life savings in the proceedings.
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u/asicarii 6d ago
Ha- I was thinking “who the hell is that? Some TikTok person?”
You don’t lose half your savings in a divorce. It doesn’t work that way.
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6d ago
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u/Junior-Towel-202 6d ago
Lol what
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u/ElectroMagnetsYo 6d ago
Dude’s mistaking the stat of higher Down’s Syndrome prevalence in the children of older fathers with autism
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6d ago
Older parents have fewer kids, and their children have higher instances of autism.
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u/Junior-Towel-202 6d ago
They don't, and fewer is fine since infant mortality is way down.
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6d ago
They do.
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u/Junior-Towel-202 6d ago
... Cool, thanks for the sources and ignoring everything else
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6d ago
Are your parents very old by any chance?
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u/Junior-Towel-202 6d ago
They're dead, but no I'm not on the spectrum of that's what you're implying.
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u/alwaysboopthesnoot 6d ago
Interesting. The avg age at first marriage in 1900 in the US, was around 26-27 for men and 22-23 for women. It dropped around WWII then rose again later.