Does Marrying Younger Mean Marrying More Often?

The historical decline in the percentage of women and men who have ever been married continued among young adults (Figure 1):

• The percentage of women ever married by age 30 declined 31.5 percentage points between the 1940-1944 and the 1985-1989 birth cohorts. The decline was even larger for men at 36.4 percentage points.
• Between the 1940-1944 and the 1980-1984 birth cohorts, the percentage of women and men ever married by age 35 declined 18.6 and 21.7 percentage points, respectively.

Aging provides increased opportunities and time for an individual to get married or remarried. As a result, it can be expected that younger cohorts will have a higher share of women and men who have never been married and a smaller share who have been married two or more times.

Given the limited amount of time adults in the 1985-1989 and the 1990-1994 birth cohorts have had to get married once, let alone twice or more, they are not included in the following analyses.

Figure 2 shows how the number of times women marry differs by birth cohort.

For instance, 4.1% of women in the 1940-1944 birth cohort had never been married in 2021, much lower than the 18.3% of never-married women in the 1975-1979 birth cohort.

Comparing the same birth cohorts, the oldest one had double the share of women married two or more times (28.6%) as the younger group (14.0%).

Although the percentage of women married only once has fluctuated across birth cohorts, it did not differ between 1940-1944 and 1975-1979 birth cohorts. 

Take for example two 36-year-olds — one who married at age 25 and the other at 32.

Both have had the same amount of time to get married once. But because they can’t marry again until the first marriage ends, the one who married at age 25 would have 11 years to end their first marriage and marry again, while the person who married at age 32 would have only four years. 

Women in younger birth cohorts are waiting longer to get married (Figure 1), and yet the oldest and the youngest cohorts do not differ in the share that married once (Figure 2).

Figure 4 breaks down the share of women married once by their age at first marriage between 1940-1944 and 1975-1979 birth cohorts. It shows that among women who married only once, the share who married earlier has decreased and the share who married later increased.

For example, the percentage of women married by age 25 who had married once decreased from 54.2% and 32.2%, between the 1940-1944 and the 1975-1979 birth cohorts, while the percentage of women married at age 26 or older who had married once increased among the same birth cohorts, from 13.1% to 35.5%, respectively.

A similar pattern can be seen among men in the same birth cohorts. Among those who had married once, the percentage married by age 25 decreased from 39.4% to 23.1% and the percentage married at age 26 or older increased from 21.7% to 42.9%.

For men married only once, the 1955-1959 birth cohort was the first one in which there was a larger share of men who married older. For women, that did not happen until the 1975-1979 birth cohort.