When do men marry

Many look at time spent as a carefree bachelor as a rite of passage. If a woman is seriously trying to find a husband, she should date men who have reached the age of commitment.

Even among men who are positively inclined toward marriage and are from identical educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, 20 percent will reach the age of commitment a year or more before our estimates, while another 20 percent will only consider marriage as a real option two to four years later.

This is usually an arrangement agreed to by the man but devised by the woman. When we conducted a focus group with 12 men who had just proposed to women, we learned that men were far more likely to marry when they got tired of the singles scene.

Our original intent was to determine how men at different ages reacted to single women they met at social gatherings. We started by asking the men about their lives before they met their future wives. How often and whom had they dated, where had they met the women, had they gone to singles places and, if so, how often? The first thing that struck us was that about a third of them said that for six months to two years before they met their brides-to-be, they were not dating or going to singles places as often as they had been just a few years earlier.

They had not stopped dating. Picking up women was no longer their main reason for going out. They told us the singles scene was not as much fun as it used to be. Four of them used one phrase or the other, and ten of twelve men in our focus group said they felt the same way: The singles scene had lost some of its appeal. Many men reluctantly admitted that for more than a year, they had felt uncomfortable in the singles world where they had been hanging out for the past five years.

The singles world for professionals obviously is an older and more sophisticated crowd than that for men whose formal education ended in high school, but eventually men from both groups had the same experience. Three young men who had graduated from the same high school were in one focus group made up of men who were about to marry. One was a plumber, one worked repairing computers, and the third was a store manager.

Each said he had begun to feel uncomfortable in his favorite singles place about two years earlier. For two of them, their singles place was a bar and pool hall where they and their single friends hung out and met women.

The third man was a very active member of a large Baptist church. For him, the singles scene was church meetings and church singles functions. Interestingly, he and the fellows who frequented bars and pool halls made the same comment. One said that the singles bar he used to visit was filled with teenyboppers, and he felt out of place. They had simply gotten too old for the crowd. It surprised us when they reported feelings identical to those of the younger high-school-educated men. The places the professional single men went drew an older crowd.

Among the professionals, the youngest women were college graduates and probably at least Professional men-unlike the younger men who had only completed high school-were perfectly at ease in their favorite singles places well into their thirties.

Still, 30 percent of the single men with a postgraduate education said that as they approached thirty, they began to feel they no longer fit into their singles scene. There were two notable exceptions to the age guidelines: men who were balding or heavy.

A year-old man who was almost completely bald explained that he had felt uncomfortable in the singles scene after he had approached a young woman in a singles bar and asked if he could buy her a drink. Her response was to tell him, loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear, that it would be a good idea if he went home and kissed his wife and played with his kids.

When he protested, she became sarcastic. He could see he was losing the argument not only with her but with the entire bar. He walked out and never went back. It is not how old they are that makes men uncomfortable, it is how old they feel, or how old others make them feel. An attorney, he told us he had been going to a restaurant for three years on Friday nights. It was a hangout for attorneys, judges, and others who worked in the court system.

Joe explained that the restaurant was usually full, and on Friday nights the bar area was crowded with young singles, while most of those seated at tables were older and married. When he showed up one Friday night, there was a new hostess seating people.

Joe was too embarrassed to contradict her, and he realized she was right — he no longer belonged at the bar. It was a series of small incidents over a period of time that turned them off-usually comments made by one or more young women that made them realize they no longer fit into the place they had frequented for years.

My own future as a spinster was close at hand. Then I met a man thousands of miles from home on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on a work trip in the Galapagos Islands. He proposed three months later, and we got married right on my 35th birthday.

Thank the matrimonial gods! A real happily ever after. The majority of my own friends got married at Less than a decade later, half of them are divorced. Many marriage therapists, the people who help fix unhappy marriages, believe this is because wisdom truly does come with age. Peter Pearson, co-founder of the Couples Institute , told me.

I was terrified of divorce. In fact, I was so nervous that I spent the first year of my marriage crowdsourcing advice from around the world to figure out how not to fail at it. Get our Health Newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest health and science news, plus answers to wellness questions and expert tips. The figures for average age at marriage appear to have levelled off in recent years, suggesting that the trend for later marriages may be reaching a limit.

Between the ages of 16 and 29, the number of women getting married is larger than the number of men. From the age of 30 onwards, however, the number of men getting married is greater than the number of women. The average age for men to marry in was 38, while for women it was In Arizona, there were 3. In , Arkansas saw 9. California has notoriously tricky divorce laws: California divorces can take months — or even years. Colorado has one of the highest divorce rates in the nation, with 3.

Children who are involved in a divorce here may be required to attend an educational program on divorce. Connecticut actually has one of the lowest marriage rates in the country, with 5.

On the other hand, there were about three divorces for every 1, people in Delaware in Spouses are required to be separated for at least six months before divorce proceedings can begin. In the nation's capital, about The Sunshine State has one of the highest divorce rates, with 3. In Hawaii, According to the Hawaii State Judiciary , if you were legally married in another state or another country but somehow settled in Hawaii, it's no matter — you can still obtain a divorce in the state.

In Idaho, there are 3. Illinois actually has one of the lowest divorce rates in the country, with 1. In Illinois, a person can file for divorce if a spouse gives the other a sexually transmitted disease.

About In Kansas, about However, there were 3. In Kentucky, couples have to have a divorce education certificate to file for divorce. In Louisiana, But, there were 3. Maryland is among the states with the lowest divorce rates in the country, with 2.

The first legal same-sex marriage in the US was performed in Massachusetts in In Michigan, In Minnesota, there's a shortcut for a fast divorce , but only if both parties are close to debt-free. In Mississippi, Fun fact: Impotence and "idiocy" are grounds for divorce. On the other hand, there were 3. Like Missouri, there were 3. But, in , there were three divorces for every 1, people in Nebraska. Nevada has the highest marriage rate in the country — almost double that of runner-up Hawaii.

In New Jersey,