Put a ring on it

Health, Sex & Relationships, Spotlight — By Amanda Voye

On a recent episode of the AMC television series “Mad Men,” Peggy Olson, a bright young copywriter at an ad agency, looks at her co-worker and sighs.

“I signed the first new business since Lucky Strike left,” she says. “But it’s not as important as getting married.”

Peggy is 26, and in the ’60s, that was pretty much over the hill. In 1960, the average age of marriage for women in the U.S. was about 20 years old. For men, it was just under 23.

Nowadays, of course, Peggy’s mid-20s singlehood wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The most common trend in relationships is “the increasing delay of the age of marriage,” says Professor John DeLamater, a relationship expert at UW-Madison. In 2009, women in Wisconsin entered their first marriage at an average age of 25.5, while men were just over 27 years old, according to a Wisconsin Department of Health study.

Many reasons account for this trend. People now spend more of their young adulthood experimenting with love and careers. Social norms have relaxed, too; it’s no longer taboo to shack up before getting hitched.

In fact, one could argue that things have moved so much in the opposite direction that young married couples are now the outliers. When a 22-year-old couple announces their engagement, there comes the inevitable, “Why so fast?”

“We know what we want to do with our lives,” Kayla Kaiser, a UW senior, says. Kaiser, 22, is engaged to Kyle Terpstra, 23, also a senior at the university. The couple met about five years ago, during their senior year of high school, and plan to marry next summer.

Neither is worried about relationship trends or marriage statistics. What’s most important, they say, is that they’re in love and feel ready to make what Kaiser acknowledges is an “enormous commitment.”

The couple plans to meet with a financial adviser, and has already begun budgeting for the wedding, Kaiser says. She is confident that with open communication and financial planning, she and Terpstra will effectively manage their money. And, she adds, the success of a marriage depends less on the age of the couple, and more on their maturity.

“I feel that Kyle and I are very mature for our age,” Kaiser says.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJEjVmfQX4I[/youtube]While that may be true, age does have something to do with it. Studies have shown that duration of marriage is linked to a woman’s age at her first marriage — the older she is, the less likely she is to divorce. It is perhaps surprising, however, that couples who marry at age 20 or older are less likely to separate than those who marry under 18.  A 2001 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that 59 percent of women who marry under the age of 18 separate from their partners or divorce within 15 years. For women who married at age 20 or older, however, the 15-year divorce rate dropped to 36 percent. The findings were based on a 1995 study of 10,847 women aged 15 to 44.

Tags: Voye, Young Marriage