Marriage is a bond of uniqueness. It forms to lives into one. But there still some facts you need to know before getting married.
Couples who marry in their late 20s may be less likely to divorce
Research led by Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor at the University of Utah, found that contrary to a long-held belief, waiting longer to wed doesn't necessarily predict a stronger marriage.
Instead, the best time to marry seems to be between the early 20s and early 30s. If you wait until you're older than 32, your chances of divorce start to creep up (though they're still not as high as if you get married in your teens).
As Wolfinger writes on the Institute for Family Studies blog, "For almost everyone, the late twenties seems to be the best time to tie the knot."
Couples may be most likely to divorce in March and August
In 2016 there was a research presented at the American Sociological Association found that March and August bring spikes in divorce filings.
The researchers say it's meaningful that March and August follow holiday or vacation periods. In the paper, they suggest that holidays represent something like "optimism cycles" — we see them as a chance to start anew in our relationships, only to find that the same problems exist once they're over.
The researchers also suspect that oftentimes our holiday experiences can be stressful and disappointing, laying bare the real issues in our marriage. As soon as they're over, we're ready to call it quits.
Married people who watch porn may be more likely to divorce
A recent study, which was presented at the American Sociological Association, found that married people who start watching pornography are about twice as likely to get divorced as those who don't.
The study, which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, involved about 2,000 participants over the course of nearly a decade. It found that the effect was even stronger for women, who were about three times as likely to get divorced if they started watching porn during the study period.
But, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out on Reason, it's possible that taking up a porn habit may signal that something else is going wrong in your relationship. Maybe you're dissatisfied with your sex life or maybe you and your partner aren't communicating well.
In other words, it might not be the porn, per se, that's causing marital problems. It might be a symptom of other underlying issues.
Husbands who don't work full-time may be more likely to get divorced
A recent Harvard study couples suggests that it's not a couple's finances that affect their chances of divorce, but rather the division of labour.
When the researcher looked at heterosexual marriages that began after 1975, she learned that couples in which the husband didn't have a full-time job had a 3.3% chance of divorcing the following year, compared to 2.5% among couples in which the husband did have a full-time job.
Wives' employment status, however, didn't much affect the couple's chances of divorce.
The researcher concludes that the male breadwinner stereotype is still very much alive, and important for marital stability.
Women who have more sexual partners before getting married aren't always more likely to get divorced
Wolfinger conducted another analysis that found, among heterosexual couples who married in the 2000s, women who had between three and nine sexual partners were in fact less likely to divorce than women who'd had two partners (a.k.a their husband and one other person).
Women who had at least 10 partners were most likely to divorce.
Meanwhile, among heterosexual couples who married in the 1980s and 1990s, women who had two or three sexual partners were more likely to get divorced than were virgins or women who had at least 10 sexual partners.
In a statement, Wolfinger distilled the lessons from this research: "If you're going to have comparisons to your husband, it's best to have more than one."
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