Men more likely to get married after 45, but that's when women start losing interest: study
Marriage among men appears to be more popular after age 45, but it’s also the age when women's interest in the institution begins to wane, a recent analysis of national marriage and divorce data by the law firm Koth Gregory & Nieminski show.
The analysis of “National Marriage and Divorce Rate Trends for 2000-2021” and “Divorce Rates by State: 1990, 1995, and 1999-2021,” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that more men marry as they get older, while women marry earlier but divorce sooner than men.
This trend is seen in data showing that while more than 68.7% of men who are 65 and older are married, less than 50% of women in this age group are married. And while under 14.2% of men are divorced at 65 or older, some 17.9% of women are divorced at this age.
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While both men and women younger than 34 were less likely to be married in 2021 and beyond compared to a decade earlier, significantly more women in this cohort, 32.3%, were found to be married compared with 25.4% of men.
“This imbalance continues until 45 to 54, when marriage rates are higher for men at 65.3%, overtaking 62.9% of women,” the analysts noted.
The data also show that between 2011 and 2021, the “Never Married” population among men increased across all age groups.
In 2011, the “Never Married” among men 20 to 34 was 67%, but by 2021, that increased to 72% of men. Among women in this age group and period, the “Never Married” population increased from 57% to 63%.
A 2020 report from the National Center for Health Statistics shows marriage rates reached its lowest point in more than 100 years due to changing norms and economic insecurity.
The report by statisticians Sally Curtin and Paul D. Sutton noted that while adults have been increasingly postponing marriage, a record number of youth and young adults are projected to forego marriage altogether.
Even though the federal government has been collecting marriage data since 1867, the report focused on marriage rate per 1,000 population from 1900 through 2018. From 2017 to 2018, the rate dropped 6%, from 6.9 per 1,000 population to 6.5, which is the lowest marriage rate on record for the period studied.
“Millennials are in peak marriage years, their 20s and 30s, and it’s still dropping,” Curtin, who is the lead author of the report, told The Wall Street Journal in 2020. “This is historic.”
Recent research highlighted how a variety of economic factors have resulted in marriage increasingly becoming a status symbol of wealth. Many successful women were also being forced to choose to remain unmarried or settle for men who earn less than $53,000 and lack a college degree, according to researchers Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell University, Joseph P. Price of Brigham Young University, and Jeffrey M. Swigert of Southern Utah University in Mismatches in the Marriage Market.
University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen, author of The Coming Divorce Decline, noted in an earlier report that today, marriage is becoming more of an “achievement of status” for those who choose it.
“Marriage is become more selective, and more stable, even as attitudes toward divorce are becoming more permissive, and cohabitation has grown less stable,” Cohen said. “The U.S. is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer, and more stable, than it was in the past, representing an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.”
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