Wyoming Responds: does marrying young mean marrying more often?

On Thursday K2 Radio News posed the question on Facebook: does marrying young mean marrying more often?

Get our free mobile app

This comes from a recent press release from the U.S. Census Bureau saying that “marrying later also meant fewer trips to the altar.”

Wyoming, however, begs to differ. Just two hours later, the responses were unanimously opposed to the notion that marrying younger meant marrying more often:

According to data released from the U.S. Census Bureau, most adults born before 1944 (78+ years) were married by the age of 25.

Half a century later, only about 30% of women and 20% of men born from 1990-1994 were married by age 25. 

Figure 1. shows that the current trend in marriages favors waiting longer before officially tying the knot.

It makes sense that as people get older, their window of opportunity to remarry becomes smaller, thus younger couples might have more time to remarry in the case of death or divorce. 

Whether that's the reason for it or not, the U.S. Census Bureau's data below shows that as people get older, they are, in fact, less likely to marry two or more times.

Other reasons might be that people are less likely to marry at all. There are a number of plausible guesses as to why the U.S. Census Bureau's data appears the way it does, but the people of Wyoming might just be an anomaly.