The New Wisdom is the Old Wisdom

Portrait of a Young Married
Couple - Jordaens, 1620

When the baby boomers became adults, the conventional wisdom--influenced by women's liberation--was revised: generally, women should wait until 30 before getting married.

The conventional wisdom is that they should get launched professionally in their 20s and wait until 30 or after to marry. Then they can establish themselves as independent adults before finding and pairing with an equally successful partner. This strategy is also supposed to maximize their odds of a lasting bond because the conventional wisdom also holds that early marriage increases the risk of divorce...

When it comes to divorce, the research has generally backed up the belief that it’s best to wait until around 30 to tie the knot. The sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah found that women who got married “too early” (mid-20s or earlier) were more likely to break up than their peers who married close to age 30.

However, marrying young did not result in breakup for one group of women: [bold added]

there is an interesting exception to the idea that waiting until 30 is best. In analyzing reports of marriage and divorce from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government’s National Survey of Family Growth (NFSG), we found that there is a group of women for whom marriage before 30 is not risky: women who married directly, without ever cohabiting prior to marriage. In fact, women who married between 22 and 30, without first living together, had some of the lowest rates of divorce in the NSFG.

The authors have found a compelling correlation between marrying young (without prior cohabitation) and marriage longevity. However, correlation is not always causation, as noted by philosopher David Hume nearly 300 years ago. More likely, both marrying young and marriage longevity are themselves the result of an underlying factor--namely the religiosity of the bride.

Pack this knowledge away in your life-navigation toolkit, dear reader. There's a lot of wisdom in there--e.g., if you get married stay married, happiness is over-rated, pay off your credit cards--but the important thing to remember is that all the advice is couched in probabilities. (For example, if you are vaccinated, you can still get COVID-19, and among the un-vaccinated some will escape the virus completely.)

There are no guarantees, just probabilities. In marriage and in life gather all the information you can, use your best judgment, then carry on.