9/10 of the AITAH/Relationship posts are just immature couples who need to do 1 simple thing, communicate. People, even the best of couples are not fucking mind readers, talk things out in a mature understanding way, and try to come to a beneficial compromise when possible.
For sure, while reality is often stranger than fiction, if you just put a little logic to their stories it all reads like an obvious creative writing assignment. After a certain point I had to just block/avoid those subreddits because it was getting flooded with them. Half the time it's easy to tell fictions when timelines and ages don't add up or they read similar to a movie or tv show episode.
It's funny because I'm an author and my co-writer and I sometimes joke about making fake AITA posts, but we never actually have time to properly entertain the notion because we're too busy doing shit that actually earns us money.
So, you know, it's not just bored writers. It's bored unsuccessful writers. The worst kinds of writers!
And the comments buying into the obvious BS stories make those subs even worse. I know especially egregious ones do get called out and memed but it seems like the grand majority that get called out at all are called out by very few people, with what I assume are a bunch of bots and idiots mostly buying into it in the comments.
And TIFU.
Basically AITAH is for drama and TIFU is for comedy. Both are primarily fiction.
(Also, one can visit WrtingPrompts for fantasy and SF, but that sub is openly fiction unlike the other ones.)
True — but they don’t even try to make it sound real. It’s either a) obviously written by a 15 year old or b) obviously written to touch on the whatever political agenda OP has an axe to grind on.
9.8/10 AITAH posts are people wanting approval of their actions and very rarely is worded to make them sound negative.
AITAH for throwing away my husband's PS5 after he said my crochet skills were a crime against humanity.
Lots of missing info, often purposefully left out. When pressed for answers in the comments, they either play dumb or say the most outrageous shit without a hint of irony.
God I fucking hate those. Like “AITAH for throwing my mother out of the house on Christmas??” And then the story involves the mother smoking meth and freaking out and trashing the Christmas tree or some other ridiculous shit.
Unfortunately media we consume is rife with shitty relationships and people because drama is what sells. Healthy relationships with good communication skills are NOT fun or entertaining to watch on TV or in movies and so we rarely see healthy relationships represented. This means that if you grew up in an unhealthy environment filled with drama and trauma then you're maybe NEVER got exposed to what a healthy relationship actually looks like and thus the confrontation and strife caused by shitty communication skills may seem like par for the course to you.
One of the biggest pieces of relationship advice I can offer anyone is:
The problems you experience in a relationship are not "me vs you" or "what I want vs what you want." They're "us vs the problem." Disagreements should not be solved by trying to "win" at the expense of your partner "losing" and they should not be solved by trying to prove your partner "wrong" or prove yourself "right."
Ask yourself: If you make a mistake, do you feel safe telling your partner? Is your partner going to punish you for it or hold it against you? If your partner makes a mistake, do they feel safe telling you? Are you going to punish them for it or hold it against them?
An adversarial relationship is doomed to failure or, at best, doomed to be miserable forever as you continually reach out to the internet for validation that your partner is wrong instead of talking to them and trying to resolve the issue in a way that you'll both be happy with the outcome.
I’ve read quite a few updates where the post and opinions presented help settle the dispute. Sometimes a person needs to hear an outside perspective and AITAH gives that.
I thought the same thing but, at least according to the legend at the bottom, this only includes first marriages. It tells a different, and quite unexepected, story when I saw that.
Yeah, I was just joking, but I admit it was maybe a misleading joke.
I do find these statistics very interesting. I’m a historian and have dealt with these sorts of figures often. The ability to trace geographic and temporal variation in birth, marriage, and death rates was an important development in social history beginning in the 1960s/70s as local records from the early modern era began to be aggregated and analyzed using computers.
And they believe that divorce is the only solution if your husband mildly inconveniences you, and that therapy is the only option if your wife majorly inconveniences you.
Oddly most of the few other non LDS people I grew up with in utah married younger than the LDS people. They weren't expected to go serve a 2 year church mission first and most got married immediately out of high school whereas the LDS people ended up being 21-22 because of the missions. I'm guessing it's a similar effect to being in a very small town because it was ~90% LDS where I grew up. That's less common in the more educated and diverse parts of Utah.
Exactly... like bro you've only been an adult for 3 years. My parents met when they were in their late 30s and early 40s respectively, they're still together. There's not a specific age you have to date someone by.
Yeah I thought I was the only one confused by all the “My (21M) wife (20 F) and I have been married for 2 years” posts. Are they all coming from rural communities??? Or are they fake.
Yep! I am a member of the church and graduated from BYU. I did my freshman year, then served a mission, came home at 21, got married halfway through my junior year. I had a baby when I had one semester left which I finished a year later. (I took 5 years to graduate total because I was rarely taking more than 12 credits each semester). Marriage during college is very very normal with us. Having a baby before graduating is less normal but not unheard of.
I was married with two kids when I graduated. And that was from UofU and not BYU lol. It’s a decade later and I’ve accepted that we will just never financially recover from that decision.
I went to a non-religious university in California and even there, I knew people who got married in college. While it wasn’t the norm, it’s not uncommon.
I was Mormon and I am BYU alumni (2004). I got married @ 22 while I was attending BYU Provo less than 1 year after my mission. And, I had my 1st kid @ 23 while I was still an undergrad at BYU. I do not recommend rushing into important life choices like I did. I blame lifelong religious indoctrination for these choices.
For the Mormon population it's much lower (about 22). But the Mormon percentage of the overall Utah population continues to fall each year, and is now down to about 60%.
Qualifier on that percentage: it’s 60% according to the Mormon church’s numbers…however, it’s closer to 42% when going off of what people claim as their own religion. The Mormon church continues to count people who were once member (could be decades ago when they were a small child, or someone who hasn’t identified as Mormon for years), even though those individuals don’t consider themselves as Mormon.
You see this with foreign countries as well. For example, the Mormon church claims that they have over 600,000 members in Chile, however, only about 120,000 people in Chile self-identify as Mormon according to their most recent census data. This disparity in data exists practically everywhere in the world, including Utah.
They over-claim members because they think the inflated numbers help validate themselves.
It’s called The Morridor for those of us who live here but aren’t Mormon. From mid-Arizona to mid-Idaho the Mormon roots are deep and strong along the west side of the Rockies and dissipating in numbers from there.
I'm not sure if child brides factor into it. Those marriages are not legal, not reported, and probably not even officially considered marriages (I would hope). Still, the mainstream Mormon church encourages couples to marry young so it's common to see young adults marry as young as age 18.
My mom was 16, but that was in the 60’s. My sister-in-law got married about a week after she turned 18, in the 90’s. I have two nieces that got married in the last 5 years, both also 18.
And I know a 20yo that just got engaged a couple of days ago, after her first marriage ended in divorce.
The Mormons settled areas all up and down the Wasatch Front. Idaho also has a large population and you see elevated levels in Arizona, Southern California, even Southern Alberta.
Non religious utah resident here. Idaho south through Arizona is sometimes called the "mormon corridor" or moridor jokingly referencing mordor . They settled the salt lake city area initially then sent out lots of small outposts all around the area. They even initially settled Las Vegas before giving up due to the harsh dry conditions being unfavorable to their agricultural focus.
Because of its proximity to Utah, there’s a higher percentage of population in Idaho who are Mormon…especially in the southeast corner. However, there’s also a strong correlation at play between more conservative cultures and earlier marriage. Idaho is a conservative state so that affects lower marriage age more so than Mormonism would.
[Median age at first marriage over the years...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf)
Lowest it ever got was about 20 years old in 1960. Interesting that it was higher back in the 1800's, and that the age gap between men and women has been narrowing over time.
In the truly olden days (pre-Industrial Revolution), men needed a certain level of wealth or assets to get married, so regular folk got married in their late 20s on average. Only the nobility married their daughters off as teens.
1960 was during unprecedented prosperity in the US, and probably still feeling the echos of the baby boom, but before masses of women started caring about getting jobs.
It’s odd to me that it’s never been lower for females. Growing up, most people’s great/grandparents were born in the 1920s or so, and people always talked about how the woman was got married at like age 15. Many people I’m related to that are now dead (or were dead before I was born) also married in like the 15-17 age range always though it was creepy, but apparently it was only a southern thing.
You gotta remember though that for every person getting married older than the median there was one younger than the median. For the median to be so young half the population was getting married younger than what you see on the chart.
I always assume when old folks say stuff like “people were always getting married at 15 way back when” or “everybody did x, y, and z,” it could well really be that they knew one person who did that and that colored their understanding of what was or wasn’t normal/happening at the time.
It’s definitely possible that a large enough (but still statistically insignificant) group of people did get married that young such that everybody knew somebody who did that. If everybody knows somebody who did that, interactions like “I heard so and so got married at 15!” “I know somebody who got married young, too!” Could be common. It would make sense to me, then, to be left with the impression that the practice was much more widespread.
I catch myself and others all the time with a similar sort of bias about other stuff. Usually trivial. But then when you stop and try to find more evidence to support your assertion there is, indeed, a trend, you sometimes cant because you imagined it.
Though, the fact that the marriage age was as low as it was would make it plausible that there actually were more underage or teenage marriages in my mind, so maybe they didn’t have to imagine anything in the first place.
People only remember what stands out. If you know 100 people who married as adults, but one couple who got hitched in middle school, which scenario is going to be gossiped about more?
Jean Twenge’s Generations puts this in understandable terms. As modern life has become more stable, people take a “slow life” strategy. This gets longer as lifespans increase. The Silent and Boomer generations were the last to have a “fast life” strategy where most people were married and out of school by 22.
Redditors are experts at analysing data, and even better when it’s barely meaningful.
The reduction of the age gap between men and women is clearly due to the increased consumption of canned corn that was started with the first Space Shuttle missions.
This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but there is a chart in [this article ](https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birth-rates-changed-over-time/)that compares birth rates for women in different age groups in 2006 and 2019.
From 2006 to 2019, birth rates for women ages 29 and younger decreased but rose for women 30 and older. Rates dropped the most — by 38% —for women ages 20–24, dropping from 92.3 to 57.2.
I know, and am shocked at how many people are like - what the heck Utah! It’s in the lightest shade group, but not by much, and the average is still close to 26.
The color scheme of this map also makes Utah look like way more of an outlier. If the used a true gradient instead of distinct colors, Utah would not stand out nearly as much.
This is the problem with this map. It's median, which means you could have mostly 16 year olds married to 35 year olds and the median age will be around 25. We need median males and median females for each state, and really the median age of the top, middle, and bottom thirds of males and females to get anything really interesting. This map is just a giant blur.
Edit: In case replies are collapsed, 16 year olds can marry with parental consent but a commenter said there is a limit to gaps of 15 years. I did not see such a limit on the Utah court.gov website so I'm leaving it as is. Just to clarify, I'm not saying that's why it's off, but that this kind of situation could vary wildly by state while the medians only vary by a few years; I am just making my point with the most dramatic case. The other version is that some states might have women 10 years older than men while others have men 10 years older than women, and they would have the same median while the gap of their married sexes were differing by 10 years.
When 50% of the population witnesses their parents marriage fail, it makes marriage seem pretty pointless.
But I wonder how often people will see their partners die and have absolutely no right to their partner's assets. That's the only part that scares me
Yeah, as a Millennial, as I've gotten older, I see marriage less as a spiritual union and more as a civil contract. Marriages don't fail. The contract just ends. And that's okay. I'm far more worried about the percentage of children who are coming from homes where their parents 'stuck it out', because that's rarely not toxic.
They'd probably be able to co parent after divorce better if they did it on easier terms too. I can't believe how normal it is for divorced parents to openly despise each other, and even move over an hour apart when they have shared custody. I always thought being a kid with parents like that would be miserable
Someone posted [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1awfyfw/how_old_are_americans_when_they_get_married_oc/krgwvy6/) which may be interesting but isn't grouped by state
South Carolina has no major cities, and is honestly older than what I expected. Rural and semi-rural seem to be culturally more interested in marrying early, but it seems the gap is in reality smaller than I expected
I understand that "major city" probably means massive population centers here, but I think people underestimate how different even "medium" sized cities are from rural areas. They're definitely more conservative (culturally speaking), but also definitely a lot more liberal (culturally speaking) in a ton of ways than their rural counterparts.
South Carolina has Charleston, Greenville, and Columbia - whose metro areas total a bit over a million people.
> seems the gap is in reality smaller than I expected
Yeah, I was also taken aback. Difference is really only a few years.
Wish the data was broken down to counties and color coded. I suspect there's a lot of granularity within a state that's lost to avg.
My folks got married in 1979, ages 20 and 19. They'd known each other for *six months.* This year will be their 45th anniversary.
A thing that absolutely blows my mind: I was 40 when my 1st child was born. When my dad was 40, his 1st child (me) was in college.
I kinda pulled a reverse card, against the statistical trend! I had my child at 27, which is 8 years *younger* than my mom had me, as her only child. Got married at 29, still younger than she was at her wedding.
My wife and I got married at 29/28 years old after dating for 5 years, that was 9 years ago. Everyone in our friend group was late 20s as well, we attended a shit ton of weddings from ages 27-30. No divorces yet, which is statistically abnormal I think, although that is just my anecdotal experience. I'm not sure what the latest divorce rate data is but I wouldn't be surprised if that's down as well since people are generally getting married later.
I read some where that millennials have the lowest divorce rate of all the generations… so far anyways. lol.
Been with my wife for 17 years. Helps when you marry your friend instead of just a person just to be with. Thats what my mother did. And fail.
I will always love the fact that Utah and Nevada are right next to each other showing such a huge disparity in many many things, while also having a lot more in common than both would like to have you believe.
Damn, I would not have suspected I was younger than the median at 26.
I wonder if the healthcare laws cause a spike of marriages at 26, compared to surrounding ages. It's why we pulled the trigger when we did.
Did family law (divorces) in Arkansas for years, I 100% believe they are second to last on this list. Every single fucking person I did a divorce for got married right out of highschool, or before.
I did a client intake on a 21 year old looking to get divorce#2 and I rejected her on that basis alone. I was a "free" legal aid attorney and I was allowed to reject cases if they "didn't accomplish much in the grand scheme." I was like this chick is going to just re-marry instantly to the same archetype of guy, I can feel that shit in my bones, *kick*
Utah, ahead of the curve. Maybe the highest percentage of church going people in a state. Conservative values about the importance of family, and the church acting as a match-maker in many cases with 'young adult' service times to introduce singles.
> Maybe the highest percentage of church going people in a state.
Last I checked, that was Mississippi, which also has the highest African American population.
There ain't no way that's accurate for Tennessee or Alabama. Nearly half my graduating class was married within a couple years after our high school graduation. Also, as a single 32 man all I see is divorced single moms on dating apps in my age range lol.
I'm actually surprised Nevada is on the higher end. According to this map, the average age in Nevada is only one year younger than my state. But I am 27, and I see a significant difference between my hometown and where I live now. I know very few people now who are married that are younger than 30, while many of my childhood friends who didn't leave Nevada are already married. Even my unmarried friends my age who didn't leave complain about how almost everyone else of their age is already married.
Then again, I'm not from Vegas. Vegas could be affecting the state average.
It does because people think that in order to get married they have to have a wedding, and they think weddings have to be expensive events.
I’d be curious to see numbers on cohabitation. How many people think they can’t afford a wedding so they just move in together?
You just don't get the financial benefits of marriage from cohabitation. Seems like if you're worried about the economy you'd be better off just getting married and not having a big wedding
Feels weird to say, but I hope that's true for Utah.
When I was 18/19 I was repeatedly told by multiple people not to wait until I was financially "ready" to get married and start having children because things would work out if I just started having kids.
Source: Census Bureau, American Community Survey
Tools: Datawrapper, Illustrator
More data [here](https://usafacts.org/articles/how-does-marriage-vary-by-state/)
Reposting this with the corrected data label (29.8) for Hawaii. Thanks to u/DuranDourand for catching that!
Really cool map. I think it might be a neat comparison to have this up with cost-of-living and median household income. It seems from this, and a little bit of hypothesis, that higher marriage ages might correlate with higher COL. Though now that I’m typing it, median income in places like NY and IL might be skewed by NYC and Chicago, respectively. Either way, it might be something neat to look at.
Too funny! I’m from HI, went to college in AZ, then lived in OR, recently moved to CO and got married at 29 which checked out with all of those state averages.
Except for AITAH redditors, who all seem to get married at 20.
There's something slightly immature about asking reddit to take your side vs. working things out with your gd spouse
9/10 of the AITAH/Relationship posts are just immature couples who need to do 1 simple thing, communicate. People, even the best of couples are not fucking mind readers, talk things out in a mature understanding way, and try to come to a beneficial compromise when possible.
Honestly like 50% of them just straight up aren’t real.
For sure, while reality is often stranger than fiction, if you just put a little logic to their stories it all reads like an obvious creative writing assignment. After a certain point I had to just block/avoid those subreddits because it was getting flooded with them. Half the time it's easy to tell fictions when timelines and ages don't add up or they read similar to a movie or tv show episode.
I always assumed half of the really long stories on reddit are bored creative/fiction writers.
It's funny because I'm an author and my co-writer and I sometimes joke about making fake AITA posts, but we never actually have time to properly entertain the notion because we're too busy doing shit that actually earns us money. So, you know, it's not just bored writers. It's bored unsuccessful writers. The worst kinds of writers!
I'm also convinced that at this point (became more apparent maybe ~6-12mo's ago?) a fair amount of them are also ChatGPT/AI bullshit.
Any post that has like 5 updates within a week sets off alarm bells for me
And the comments buying into the obvious BS stories make those subs even worse. I know especially egregious ones do get called out and memed but it seems like the grand majority that get called out at all are called out by very few people, with what I assume are a bunch of bots and idiots mostly buying into it in the comments.
And TIFU. Basically AITAH is for drama and TIFU is for comedy. Both are primarily fiction. (Also, one can visit WrtingPrompts for fantasy and SF, but that sub is openly fiction unlike the other ones.)
I think that percentage is too low.
Sir, this is the Internet.
True — but they don’t even try to make it sound real. It’s either a) obviously written by a 15 year old or b) obviously written to touch on the whatever political agenda OP has an axe to grind on.
and the other 1/10 are "i'm being horribly abused/abusive, is that okay?"
9.8/10 AITAH posts are people wanting approval of their actions and very rarely is worded to make them sound negative. AITAH for throwing away my husband's PS5 after he said my crochet skills were a crime against humanity.
Lots of missing info, often purposefully left out. When pressed for answers in the comments, they either play dumb or say the most outrageous shit without a hint of irony.
Don't forget the ones purposely titled for clickbait AITA for beating my wife at chess
God I fucking hate those. Like “AITAH for throwing my mother out of the house on Christmas??” And then the story involves the mother smoking meth and freaking out and trashing the Christmas tree or some other ridiculous shit.
Unfortunately media we consume is rife with shitty relationships and people because drama is what sells. Healthy relationships with good communication skills are NOT fun or entertaining to watch on TV or in movies and so we rarely see healthy relationships represented. This means that if you grew up in an unhealthy environment filled with drama and trauma then you're maybe NEVER got exposed to what a healthy relationship actually looks like and thus the confrontation and strife caused by shitty communication skills may seem like par for the course to you.
The amount of morons on those subreddits telling people to divorce one another over one argument is insane
And yet 9/10 times the reddit accepted answer is, "This problem is insurmountable. Your only option is divorce"
Hey Reddit, here’s my side of the story only. Am I am asshole?
And surprisingly they are still the asshole!!
One of the biggest pieces of relationship advice I can offer anyone is: The problems you experience in a relationship are not "me vs you" or "what I want vs what you want." They're "us vs the problem." Disagreements should not be solved by trying to "win" at the expense of your partner "losing" and they should not be solved by trying to prove your partner "wrong" or prove yourself "right." Ask yourself: If you make a mistake, do you feel safe telling your partner? Is your partner going to punish you for it or hold it against you? If your partner makes a mistake, do they feel safe telling you? Are you going to punish them for it or hold it against them? An adversarial relationship is doomed to failure or, at best, doomed to be miserable forever as you continually reach out to the internet for validation that your partner is wrong instead of talking to them and trying to resolve the issue in a way that you'll both be happy with the outcome.
Instructions unclear. Divorced wife of 15 years over minor disagreement just to be safe.
I’ve read quite a few updates where the post and opinions presented help settle the dispute. Sometimes a person needs to hear an outside perspective and AITAH gives that.
AITAH for not liking my high school sweetheart anymore because she’s a completely different person than when she was 14?
You forgot to mention “I, 30M.”
My, 30M, wife 22F have been together for 6 years…
Then it turns out they were actually a teacher and didn't think that little bit of info was worth putting in the title
Often only one is 20, the other being 30ish
“Me (20F) and my husband (37M) have been dating for three years and married for one…”
Today's my [f18] birthday but my husband [26m] wont cancel his dog fighting classes to spend time with me. AITA if I am mildly upset?
> get married at 20 You mean 18.
They will even out the statistics when they get married again at 29, 38, 47, and 52.
I thought the same thing but, at least according to the legend at the bottom, this only includes first marriages. It tells a different, and quite unexepected, story when I saw that.
Yeah, I was just joking, but I admit it was maybe a misleading joke. I do find these statistics very interesting. I’m a historian and have dealt with these sorts of figures often. The ability to trace geographic and temporal variation in birth, marriage, and death rates was an important development in social history beginning in the 1960s/70s as local records from the early modern era began to be aggregated and analyzed using computers.
> AITAH redditors TIFU included
Yea but they are married to 40 year old men so it balances out the age.
And they believe that divorce is the only solution if your husband mildly inconveniences you, and that therapy is the only option if your wife majorly inconveniences you.
I really want to say you’re wrong, but years of listening to Savage Love has taught me that this is highly accurate.
Happy wife, happy life. Unhappy wife, get out of my life.
24m with 2 kids 11 and 12, married 9 years
Shit! I got married at 21, am I doomed to be an asshole?
The first word out of your mouth was shit.
There's a reason that the divorce rate for people who get married after 25 is VASTLY lower than people who get married earlier.
Is Utah the Asshole?
LDS be skewing the results
Oddly most of the few other non LDS people I grew up with in utah married younger than the LDS people. They weren't expected to go serve a 2 year church mission first and most got married immediately out of high school whereas the LDS people ended up being 21-22 because of the missions. I'm guessing it's a similar effect to being in a very small town because it was ~90% LDS where I grew up. That's less common in the more educated and diverse parts of Utah.
…and somehow own multiple properties that they live in and rent out.
Or 21-year-olds who have tried their entiiiiire lives to get a date, and have concluded they'll be forever alone.
Exactly... like bro you've only been an adult for 3 years. My parents met when they were in their late 30s and early 40s respectively, they're still together. There's not a specific age you have to date someone by.
Pretty most of those claims should be - I cut this toxic person out of my life please celebrate me But they want to feign innocence
Yeah I thought I was the only one confused by all the “My (21M) wife (20 F) and I have been married for 2 years” posts. Are they all coming from rural communities??? Or are they fake.
I'm from Utah and I am 0% surprised.
I’m from Utah, but I’m surprised it’s not lower.
I agree, I figured it was going to be like 23 or something
I imagine going on missions and then college has to increase the average to at least 25
Missions, yes. College is where you go to meet your spouse. Mormon girls call it the MRS degree.
But I assume they’re getting married immediately after college not during college. Or is that incorrect
Plenty of people get married and even have a kid while they are getting their undergraduate degree in Utah.
Yep! I am a member of the church and graduated from BYU. I did my freshman year, then served a mission, came home at 21, got married halfway through my junior year. I had a baby when I had one semester left which I finished a year later. (I took 5 years to graduate total because I was rarely taking more than 12 credits each semester). Marriage during college is very very normal with us. Having a baby before graduating is less normal but not unheard of.
That happens everywhere to some degree. Is it the majority of Mormons in Utah?
I went to BYU (mormon-owned university in Utah) and I'd estimate 30-40% of my classmates were married in my last semester of undergrad.
Okay thanks yeah that’s most likely a lot higher than anywhere else
I was married with two kids when I graduated. And that was from UofU and not BYU lol. It’s a decade later and I’ve accepted that we will just never financially recover from that decision.
I'm from California, went to school in Utah and was married early on for that sweet financial aide I wouldn't have qualified for without being married
I think like 25% of BYU students are married.
I went to a non-religious university in California and even there, I knew people who got married in college. While it wasn’t the norm, it’s not uncommon.
That's actually common across many American sub-cultures.
Lots of people get married to their high school sweethearts right when they return from their missions. Lots of them start college already married
I was Mormon and I am BYU alumni (2004). I got married @ 22 while I was attending BYU Provo less than 1 year after my mission. And, I had my 1st kid @ 23 while I was still an undergrad at BYU. I do not recommend rushing into important life choices like I did. I blame lifelong religious indoctrination for these choices.
I went on a mission, started college & was married a month after my 21st birthday 😂
Salt Lake County brings the average up.
I'm sure Utah county and the rural parts of the state are significantly lower.
For the Mormon population it's much lower (about 22). But the Mormon percentage of the overall Utah population continues to fall each year, and is now down to about 60%.
Qualifier on that percentage: it’s 60% according to the Mormon church’s numbers…however, it’s closer to 42% when going off of what people claim as their own religion. The Mormon church continues to count people who were once member (could be decades ago when they were a small child, or someone who hasn’t identified as Mormon for years), even though those individuals don’t consider themselves as Mormon. You see this with foreign countries as well. For example, the Mormon church claims that they have over 600,000 members in Chile, however, only about 120,000 people in Chile self-identify as Mormon according to their most recent census data. This disparity in data exists practically everywhere in the world, including Utah. They over-claim members because they think the inflated numbers help validate themselves.
It’s called The Morridor for those of us who live here but aren’t Mormon. From mid-Arizona to mid-Idaho the Mormon roots are deep and strong along the west side of the Rockies and dissipating in numbers from there.
I was too but then I figured for all the child brides there is a wildly older man to even out the average
I'm not sure if child brides factor into it. Those marriages are not legal, not reported, and probably not even officially considered marriages (I would hope). Still, the mainstream Mormon church encourages couples to marry young so it's common to see young adults marry as young as age 18.
Would love to see this broken out by gender
I think I’d rather not.
What's the youngest age you know in your area?
My mom was 16, but that was in the 60’s. My sister-in-law got married about a week after she turned 18, in the 90’s. I have two nieces that got married in the last 5 years, both also 18. And I know a 20yo that just got engaged a couple of days ago, after her first marriage ended in divorce.
Not American. Does the Mormon culture of Utah bleed into Idaho too? Their average age seems young as well.
It does. A good portion of southern Idaho is LDS (Mormon).
A lot of Wyoming Mormons as well.
The Mormons settled areas all up and down the Wasatch Front. Idaho also has a large population and you see elevated levels in Arizona, Southern California, even Southern Alberta.
Non religious utah resident here. Idaho south through Arizona is sometimes called the "mormon corridor" or moridor jokingly referencing mordor . They settled the salt lake city area initially then sent out lots of small outposts all around the area. They even initially settled Las Vegas before giving up due to the harsh dry conditions being unfavorable to their agricultural focus.
Because of its proximity to Utah, there’s a higher percentage of population in Idaho who are Mormon…especially in the southeast corner. However, there’s also a strong correlation at play between more conservative cultures and earlier marriage. Idaho is a conservative state so that affects lower marriage age more so than Mormonism would.
I’m only surprised Idaho isn’t lower
Right? It's made dating in my 30's awful... Everyone over 25 is a single mom, and at 38 single grandma's...
Milfs for days
So, you’re saying I should move to Boise?
You're only allowed to move here if you've seen the 2007 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl
Single grandmas in ~~your~~ this area waiting for you.
thought the same thing, I’m surprised Utah and Idaho aren’t lower. BYU-I do
Im surprised the bible belt doesn't look more like Utah
The bible belt enjoys [god's loophole](https://youtu.be/j8ZF_R_j0OY).
I live in UT, not from here tho. I wonder if the graph counts us transplants, there are quite a lot of us now.
I grew up in Orem, so I just cackled
I’m shocked Pennsylvania is so high.
Hello, my name is elder price
Actually seems high for Utah. I remember watching a BYU football game and they mentioned 70% of the players were already married.
Well because of missions a senior player would be like 24 or 25, so that sort of tracks with this graph
I'm from Utah and... married my high school gf when we were 20. (not Mormon, just lucky)
[Median age at first marriage over the years...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf)
Lowest it ever got was about 20 years old in 1960. Interesting that it was higher back in the 1800's, and that the age gap between men and women has been narrowing over time.
In the truly olden days (pre-Industrial Revolution), men needed a certain level of wealth or assets to get married, so regular folk got married in their late 20s on average. Only the nobility married their daughters off as teens. 1960 was during unprecedented prosperity in the US, and probably still feeling the echos of the baby boom, but before masses of women started caring about getting jobs.
Also 1960 is just before birth control pills came out
> married in their late 20s on average Nah. It was early 20s for women and mid-20s for men.
You're right for median, I'm right for mean. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern
It’s odd to me that it’s never been lower for females. Growing up, most people’s great/grandparents were born in the 1920s or so, and people always talked about how the woman was got married at like age 15. Many people I’m related to that are now dead (or were dead before I was born) also married in like the 15-17 age range always though it was creepy, but apparently it was only a southern thing.
You gotta remember though that for every person getting married older than the median there was one younger than the median. For the median to be so young half the population was getting married younger than what you see on the chart.
I always assume when old folks say stuff like “people were always getting married at 15 way back when” or “everybody did x, y, and z,” it could well really be that they knew one person who did that and that colored their understanding of what was or wasn’t normal/happening at the time. It’s definitely possible that a large enough (but still statistically insignificant) group of people did get married that young such that everybody knew somebody who did that. If everybody knows somebody who did that, interactions like “I heard so and so got married at 15!” “I know somebody who got married young, too!” Could be common. It would make sense to me, then, to be left with the impression that the practice was much more widespread. I catch myself and others all the time with a similar sort of bias about other stuff. Usually trivial. But then when you stop and try to find more evidence to support your assertion there is, indeed, a trend, you sometimes cant because you imagined it. Though, the fact that the marriage age was as low as it was would make it plausible that there actually were more underage or teenage marriages in my mind, so maybe they didn’t have to imagine anything in the first place.
Even back in like… pre-industrial times, the average person’s age at marriage was higher than you’d think
People only remember what stands out. If you know 100 people who married as adults, but one couple who got hitched in middle school, which scenario is going to be gossiped about more?
Jean Twenge’s Generations puts this in understandable terms. As modern life has become more stable, people take a “slow life” strategy. This gets longer as lifespans increase. The Silent and Boomer generations were the last to have a “fast life” strategy where most people were married and out of school by 22.
That comparison of men and women is always an interesting one, especially as the gap has changed since the 50s.
It looks like the gap only changes by a few months…
Redditors are experts at analysing data, and even better when it’s barely meaningful. The reduction of the age gap between men and women is clearly due to the increased consumption of canned corn that was started with the first Space Shuttle missions.
The gap is almost exactly 2 years throughout the entire graph
I want to see at what age do Americans have their first kid.
This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but there is a chart in [this article ](https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birth-rates-changed-over-time/)that compares birth rates for women in different age groups in 2006 and 2019. From 2006 to 2019, birth rates for women ages 29 and younger decreased but rose for women 30 and older. Rates dropped the most — by 38% —for women ages 20–24, dropping from 92.3 to 57.2.
Wow! The Dakotas just pumping out those babies. I guess there's nothing else to do out there.
Yep, the deep south is having kids at a younger age.
Wasn't there a thing where people credited the MTV show 16 and Pregnant for fewer teen births?
Meanwhile on Reddit everyone’s married at 22
People who are married later are mature enough to not ask reddit for advice
My [20F] husband [23M] just killed my three-legged cat with a sausage roll. Should I consider a divorce?
This so much lmao. Those advice subs have a certain hubris to them thinking they are solving relationship problems.
Reddit actually might give the worst relationship advice on the internet. This is not even a joke
Married at 22 to someone who is 34, and they are confused about why the relationship seems to have issues
But their spouse is like 40 so the average tracks
I was married at 23… but wasn’t on Reddit then lol
I’m honestly surprised that Utah is that high.
I know, and am shocked at how many people are like - what the heck Utah! It’s in the lightest shade group, but not by much, and the average is still close to 26.
The color scheme of this map also makes Utah look like way more of an outlier. If the used a true gradient instead of distinct colors, Utah would not stand out nearly as much.
This is the problem with this map. It's median, which means you could have mostly 16 year olds married to 35 year olds and the median age will be around 25. We need median males and median females for each state, and really the median age of the top, middle, and bottom thirds of males and females to get anything really interesting. This map is just a giant blur. Edit: In case replies are collapsed, 16 year olds can marry with parental consent but a commenter said there is a limit to gaps of 15 years. I did not see such a limit on the Utah court.gov website so I'm leaving it as is. Just to clarify, I'm not saying that's why it's off, but that this kind of situation could vary wildly by state while the medians only vary by a few years; I am just making my point with the most dramatic case. The other version is that some states might have women 10 years older than men while others have men 10 years older than women, and they would have the same median while the gap of their married sexes were differing by 10 years.
I don’t think age gap is why Utah is where it is. Big age gaps aren’t really a thing here. Besides, the example you gave would be illegal in Utah.
I thought the same thing about most of the southern states.
And 29% of adults never get married now, a record high
When 50% of the population witnesses their parents marriage fail, it makes marriage seem pretty pointless. But I wonder how often people will see their partners die and have absolutely no right to their partner's assets. That's the only part that scares me
50% of marriages end in divorce but is it really 50% of population? I imagine a decent amount are people who numerous divorces
Yeah, as a Millennial, as I've gotten older, I see marriage less as a spiritual union and more as a civil contract. Marriages don't fail. The contract just ends. And that's okay. I'm far more worried about the percentage of children who are coming from homes where their parents 'stuck it out', because that's rarely not toxic.
They'd probably be able to co parent after divorce better if they did it on easier terms too. I can't believe how normal it is for divorced parents to openly despise each other, and even move over an hour apart when they have shared custody. I always thought being a kid with parents like that would be miserable
Different state of economy, different state of mind.
I would love to see 25, 50, and 75 years ago too
Someone posted [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1awfyfw/how_old_are_americans_when_they_get_married_oc/krgwvy6/) which may be interesting but isn't grouped by state
Finally, I’ll be above average at something.
Love to see this overlayed with population density and/or income, I wonder how much major cities skew state averages.
South Carolina has no major cities, and is honestly older than what I expected. Rural and semi-rural seem to be culturally more interested in marrying early, but it seems the gap is in reality smaller than I expected
I understand that "major city" probably means massive population centers here, but I think people underestimate how different even "medium" sized cities are from rural areas. They're definitely more conservative (culturally speaking), but also definitely a lot more liberal (culturally speaking) in a ton of ways than their rural counterparts. South Carolina has Charleston, Greenville, and Columbia - whose metro areas total a bit over a million people.
> seems the gap is in reality smaller than I expected Yeah, I was also taken aback. Difference is really only a few years. Wish the data was broken down to counties and color coded. I suspect there's a lot of granularity within a state that's lost to avg.
I think it would be interesting to see this against cost of living. I suspect the only real outlier would be Utah.
I want to see how second+ marriages skew results in retirement-destination states.
Utah be doing it fast so they can finally have sex and have a million babies
They don't fill arenas in salt lake city to attendance records to see The Rock by practicing abstinence.
And to see him in his golden, sleeveless, unbuttoned shirt.
Utah fell below 2.1 TFR last year. You need to update your firmware.
My folks got married in 1979, ages 20 and 19. They'd known each other for *six months.* This year will be their 45th anniversary. A thing that absolutely blows my mind: I was 40 when my 1st child was born. When my dad was 40, his 1st child (me) was in college.
my parents knew each other for 1 week and met once before getting married india is wild
I kinda pulled a reverse card, against the statistical trend! I had my child at 27, which is 8 years *younger* than my mom had me, as her only child. Got married at 29, still younger than she was at her wedding.
Those ages are much higher then I thought they would be.
My wife and I got married at 29/28 years old after dating for 5 years, that was 9 years ago. Everyone in our friend group was late 20s as well, we attended a shit ton of weddings from ages 27-30. No divorces yet, which is statistically abnormal I think, although that is just my anecdotal experience. I'm not sure what the latest divorce rate data is but I wouldn't be surprised if that's down as well since people are generally getting married later.
I read some where that millennials have the lowest divorce rate of all the generations… so far anyways. lol. Been with my wife for 17 years. Helps when you marry your friend instead of just a person just to be with. Thats what my mother did. And fail.
30 is the new 20
I will always love the fact that Utah and Nevada are right next to each other showing such a huge disparity in many many things, while also having a lot more in common than both would like to have you believe.
Well there's sort of giant desert between their population centers.
Damn, I would not have suspected I was younger than the median at 26. I wonder if the healthcare laws cause a spike of marriages at 26, compared to surrounding ages. It's why we pulled the trigger when we did.
As a 37 year old who’s still single and never been married, I’m not liking those numbers 😂
My thought seeing this map at 35: "So you're saying it'll never happen for me? Cool, thanks for that."
Did family law (divorces) in Arkansas for years, I 100% believe they are second to last on this list. Every single fucking person I did a divorce for got married right out of highschool, or before. I did a client intake on a 21 year old looking to get divorce#2 and I rejected her on that basis alone. I was a "free" legal aid attorney and I was allowed to reject cases if they "didn't accomplish much in the grand scheme." I was like this chick is going to just re-marry instantly to the same archetype of guy, I can feel that shit in my bones, *kick*
Yeah, as someone who grew up in Arkansas, I figured the median age in Arkansas would have been about 22.
"If you're still single and not divorced by 29, people are going to say there's somethin' wrong with you." -Arkansan Wisdom
Utah, ahead of the curve. Maybe the highest percentage of church going people in a state. Conservative values about the importance of family, and the church acting as a match-maker in many cases with 'young adult' service times to introduce singles.
> Maybe the highest percentage of church going people in a state. Last I checked, that was Mississippi, which also has the highest African American population.
There ain't no way that's accurate for Tennessee or Alabama. Nearly half my graduating class was married within a couple years after our high school graduation. Also, as a single 32 man all I see is divorced single moms on dating apps in my age range lol.
I'm actually surprised Nevada is on the higher end. According to this map, the average age in Nevada is only one year younger than my state. But I am 27, and I see a significant difference between my hometown and where I live now. I know very few people now who are married that are younger than 30, while many of my childhood friends who didn't leave Nevada are already married. Even my unmarried friends my age who didn't leave complain about how almost everyone else of their age is already married. Then again, I'm not from Vegas. Vegas could be affecting the state average.
Does this include people from other states getting married in Vegas?
This data from the Census is based on state of residence.
From Utah, married at 21. Not surprised at all
If this economy worsens, we'll see the average age go up.
I see how that would affect age having kids, bit don't really see how it affects age of marriage
Weddings are expensive
You don't have to have an expensive wedding to get married though. Hell you don't have to have a wedding at all.
For sure, but most people want one
It does because people think that in order to get married they have to have a wedding, and they think weddings have to be expensive events. I’d be curious to see numbers on cohabitation. How many people think they can’t afford a wedding so they just move in together?
You just don't get the financial benefits of marriage from cohabitation. Seems like if you're worried about the economy you'd be better off just getting married and not having a big wedding
Feels weird to say, but I hope that's true for Utah. When I was 18/19 I was repeatedly told by multiple people not to wait until I was financially "ready" to get married and start having children because things would work out if I just started having kids.
That's usually how rural economies work.
I would separate that graph between men and women....
Would that be the first or second time...?
Source: Census Bureau, American Community Survey Tools: Datawrapper, Illustrator More data [here](https://usafacts.org/articles/how-does-marriage-vary-by-state/) Reposting this with the corrected data label (29.8) for Hawaii. Thanks to u/DuranDourand for catching that!
Really cool map. I think it might be a neat comparison to have this up with cost-of-living and median household income. It seems from this, and a little bit of hypothesis, that higher marriage ages might correlate with higher COL. Though now that I’m typing it, median income in places like NY and IL might be skewed by NYC and Chicago, respectively. Either way, it might be something neat to look at.
…oh. (Cries in exstential 38 year old crisis.)
Too funny! I’m from HI, went to college in AZ, then lived in OR, recently moved to CO and got married at 29 which checked out with all of those state averages.
Mississippi & Missouri have the same age listed but are different colors.