What's the Best Age Difference for Marriage?

The traditional vision of a couple is an older man and a younger woman. This cultural vision is established on the basis that the man should be able to provide his family with everything it needs, and the woman has to be attractive and healthy to give birth to children. Regarding this, it's possible to say that the bigger the age difference, the more successful the marriage will be.

There is also the other side of the coin. An average woman lives longer than an average man, that's why if a woman of 25 marries a man of 30, she is likely to become a widow a decade before she dies herself. It makes women look for partners of the same age and even younger men. But what about stability, you may ask?

In fact almost every third woman would choose a man who's 7 years older then her for marriage, because he's more financially stable. It might sound ugly, but women really choose men who can provide the family with everything needed.

And these women are very close in their judgment to an existing formula for counting the perfect age for your partner. The formula says that the age of the younger partner shouldn't be less than a half of older partner's age plus 7. It means that if you're 30, then your partner’s age should be: 30/2+7=22 and older. And if you're 40, then it's 27 and older.

You see that the age difference is very big. Sociologists couldn't keep from contributing to this issue and conducted a special research among the couples of different age gaps and counted those who divorced. According to their data, even one year of age difference makes them 3 percent more likely to get divorced. The digit goes higher to 18 percent if the age gap is 5 years. The couples, in which the partners have 10 years of age difference, are 39 percent likely to get divorced. If a spouse is 20 years older, than the couple is 95 percent likely to get divorced.

Here's also bright information for you: the couples who have lived together for two years are already 43 percent less likely to divorce. If you make it to 10 years, then you're about 94 percent less likely to divorce.

No matter whether you believe this prediction or not, remember that marriage is always a 50/50 partnership. And if you are not ready to deal with differences in life experience and cultural reference points, then you really should marry a person of your age.