Do your divorce odds go down the longer you wait to get married?

You’ve likely heard that those who get married very young have higher divorce rates than those who wait. This is often stated when someone talks about getting married at 18 or 19 years old. It’s not that these marriages never work, but just that they statistically end at a much higher rate than people who wait a little longer to tie the knot.

But does this mean that your divorce odds continue to go down every year for the rest of your life? Are those odds always dropping, and should you always keep putting off marriage if you can?

Waiting until 32 years old

Interestingly, the divorce odds do not keep dropping for life. They essentially drop every year until around age 32. After that, they start going back up again for every year that people wait. So if you waited until 40, you’d have higher odds than you did it 32. They may still not be back up to the height that you reached when you were 18 and it was very risky to get married, but those odds do not continue to drop ceaselessly.

One potential reason for statistics that look like this is that many people getting married after age 32 are entering into a second marriage, and it has been found that second marriages have higher divorce rates than first marriages.

Regardless of the reason that you’re getting married at your age, it’s important to know both the odds of divorce and all of the legal options you have if you do wind up deciding to split.