Ten Important Research Findings on Marriage and Choosing a Marriage Partner: Helpful Facts for Young Adults

1. Marrying as a teenager is the highest known risk factor for divorce.

People who marry in their teens are two to three times more likely to divorce than people who marry in their twenties or older.
2. The most likely way to find a future marriage partner is through an introduction by family, friends or acquaintances. Despite the romantic notion that people meet and fall in love through chance or fate, the evidence suggests that social networks are important in bringing together individuals of similar interests and backgrounds, especially when it comes to selecting a marriage partner.
3. The more similar people are in their values, backgrounds and life goals, the more likely they are to have a successful marriage.
Opposites may attract but they may not live together harmoniously as married couples. People who share common backgrounds and similar social networks are better suited as marriage partners than people who are very different in their backgrounds and networks.
4. Women have a significantly better chance of marrying if they do not become single parents before marrying. Having a child out of wedlock reduces the chance of ever marrying.
Despite the increasing numbers of potential marriage partners with children, one study noted, "having children is still one of the least desirable characteristics a potential marriage partner can possess."
5. Both women and men who are college educated are more likely to marry, and less likely to divorce, than people with lower levels of education. Despite occasional news stories predicting lifelong singlehood for college-educated women, these predictions have proven false. Though the first generation of college-educated women (those who earned baccalaureate degrees in the 1920s) married less frequently than their less-educated peers, the reverse is true today. College-educated women's chances of marrying are better than less well-educated women. However, the growing gender gap in college education may make it more difficult for college women to find similarly well-educated men in the future.
6. Living together before marriage has not proved useful as a "trial marriage." People who have multiple cohabiting relationships before marriage are more likely to experience marital conflict, marital unhappiness and eventual divorce than people who do not cohabit before marriage. Researchers attribute some but not all of these differences to the differing characteristics of people who cohabit—the so-called "selection effect"—rather than to the experience of cohabiting itself. It has been hypothesized that the negative effects of cohabitation on future marital success may diminish as living together becomes a common experience among today's young adults.
7. Marriage helps people to generate income and wealth. Compared to those who merely live together, people who marry become economically better off. Men become more productive after marriage; they earn between 10 and 40 percent more than do single men with similar education and job histories. Marital social norms that encourage healthy, productive behavior and wealth accumulation play a role.
8. People who are married are more likely to have emotionally and physically satisfying sex lives than single people or those who just live together. Contrary to the popular belief that married sex is boring and infrequent, married people report higher levels of sexual satisfaction than both sexually active singles and cohabiting couples, according to the most comprehensive and recent survey of sexuality. Forty-two percent of wives said they found sex extremely emotionally and physically satisfying, compared to just 31 percent of single women who had a sex partner. And 48 percent of husbands said sex was extremely satisfying emotionally, compared to just 37 percent of cohabiting men.
9. People who grow up in a family broken by divorce are slightly less likely to marry, and much more likely to divorce when they do marry. According to one study, the divorce risk nearly triples if one marries someone who also comes from a broken home. The increased risk is much lower, however, if the marital partner is someone who grew up in a happy, in-tact family.
10. For large segments of the population, the risk of divorce is far below 50 percent. Although the overall divorce rate in America remains close to 50 percent of all marriages, it has been dropping gradually over the past two decades. Also, the risk of divorce is far below 50 percent for educated people going into their first marriage, and lower still for people who wait to marry at least until their mid-twenties, haven't lived with many different partners prior to marriage, or are strongly religious and marry someone of the same faith.