Thursday, May 31, 2007
News

Worth the wait

Later marriages take more risks—but are more stable than ever

Rachel Yelk Woodruff married her husband Fred when she was 31. CREDIT: Courtesy of Rachel Yelk Woodruff

Susan Stephan with her husband Werner and their daughter Angel-Malaya. The Stephans, who live in Gainesville, married in their mid-30s and recently celebrated their 21st anniversary. CREDIT: Courtesy of Susan Stephan

“Women in the so-called Bible Belt tend to marry earlier and have higher divorce rates.”—Stephanie Coonzt, author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage”

By Diane Loupe

Amy RayCollins could have married at 22, but she broke off the engagement because she knew she “hadn’t yet tasted the world, nor had [her] fill of dating.”

When she finally married at the age of 34, she’d built a successful career as an electrical engineer and had traveled to several continents.

“I definitely think my marriage is stronger for having waited,” says RayCollins, who lives in Atlanta with her husband and their two children. “With each subsequent job or relationship I grew to know myself better and become more independent. Thus, by the time I married, I was more discerning in my dating: I knew better what factors were important long-term and which weren’t.”

In November 2005, USA Today published the headline “Early to wed may make marriage happy, survey says.” The article read, “Americans are waiting longer to get married, but they shouldn’t wait too long: The odds for a happy marriage may favor those who tie the knot between the ages of 23 and 27.” That survey was designed and analyzed
by University of Texas sociology professor Norval Glenn for the National Fatherhood Initiative, which advocates marriage and family values.

These days, many social scientists are finding those results—based on a 15-minute national telephone survey of 1,503 men and women ages 18 and older in late 2003 and early 2004—didn’t tell the whole story. Ray- Collins’ feeling of stability seems to be closer to the norm for late hitchers—and it’s more than a feeling.

According to a study released this month, later marriages are more common today—the average bride is nearly 26, marrying a groom of 27—but they’re also healthier than they were a generation ago, when our mothers and grandmothers, who got married from 1950 to 1960 usually did so by the time they were 20. Evelyn Lehrer, a social economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who conducted the new research, suggests that couples who marry for the first time a little later in life do have stable, if less traditional, marriages.

“They are more likely to enter unconventional matches that generally carry extra risks, such as marrying a man three years younger or more; someone of a different religion, educational level or race; or someone who has been divorced,” says Lehrer, who notes that maturity probably means making better choices.

She examined data from the National Survey of Family Growth, conducted in 1995 and from 2002 to 2003, comparing the age when women first married with whether the marriage was intact five years later. Women who married in their teens were most likely to be divorced five years later, and the probability of divorce declined as the women’s age increased, flattening out after age 30. 

Rachel Yelk Woodruff waited until she’d finished graduate school, had traveled and was financially stable before she married at the age of 31.

“This self-sufficiency was always very important to me, after seeing my mother divorce with few options and two young children,” she says. “I am in this marriage because I want to be, not because I have to be—and that makes a huge difference to me.”

But there was a predictable downside: “By the time I got married my biological clock was, well, an alarm!” says Woodruff, who lives with her husband and their 2-year-old son in DeKalb County. “Marriage was easy. It was the first year of parenthood that was very challenging for our relationship.”

Southern women tend to marry earlier than women in other parts of the country, says Stephanie Coontz, director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families, and author of “Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”

“Women in the so-called Bible Belt tend to marry earlier and have higher divorce rates,” Coontz says. “That’s partly because they also tend to have higher rates of economic stress or insecurity and lower rates of education. But, of course, there are always exceptions, and we all know people who have married early and made it work.”

But Coontz says her own studies of marriage have convinced her that the key to marriage success is accepting women’s new roles and new equality.

“In the 1950s, choosing a man with traditional ideas about being the breadwinner was usually a woman’s best bet for a stable marriage,” says Coontz. “Today, men with traditional ideas about women’s roles are more likely to divorce, or be divorced, than are women with more egalitarian ideas.”

She points out that, in 1900, the average age of brides was 22, while 1950 saw an anomaly—the average bride was 20, the youngest age in almost a century. Susan Stephan of Gainesville met her German husband while traveling in India and got married a week before her 33rd birthday. Her first child was born when she was 40, and the couple has now passed their 21st anniversary.

“Marrying later allows one to pick out a hubby who shares your interests and loves and sense of humor, and those things can bond you together much longer than physical attraction alone,” says Stephan.

Remarriages, on the other hand, are more divorce-prone. Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, notes that most second marriages occur after 30 and “second marriages have higher breakup rates than first marriages. It can be difficult to hold a stepfamily together.”

Still, says sociologist Virginia Rutter, a good divorce is preferable to a rotten marriage—at any age.

“In my research, partners who are in distressed and conflicted marriages are actually more depressed than partners who go on to divorce,” says Rutter, who works at Framingham State College in Massachusetts. She advises that couples who “avoid contempt, criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling are less likely to fail.”

Pam Eidson and her husband, Seth Tepfer, wed at 35.

“I do think our marriage is stronger for marrying later, if for nothing else than we had time to work out a lot of who we are before we got together at 32,” says Eidson. And when people ask, “Is this your first marriage?,” Eidson and Tepfer, now the parents of a 2-year-old, reply, “It’s our only marriage.” SP