Today we have some information that you may want to store away for future reference, especially if you have just decided to file for divorce. If you ever plan to start dating again after the papers are final, you may want to pay special attention to the age of your mate. Apparently, small age gaps reduce the likelihood that you will file divorce forms.
This reveal comes from a study conducted by data visualizer Randy Olson and published on the Social Science Research Network.
“Only being one to five years away from your partner is nothing to worry about, but if you’re old enough to be your partner’s parent, then your marriage might be in trouble,” Olson said, adding that “it is not possible to determine the relative percent likelihood” of a marriage’s success or failure based on just age.
The Daily Mail reports that the study utilized a “multivariate model” to arrive at the factors which best predict a marriage’s chances of success. It also examined factors like money, children, and time spent dating the individual subjects went on to marry.
Of particular noteworthiness were reveals like this: Having a child together could decrease the chance of divorce “by as much as 76 percent compared to couples who did not have children” and “having children out of wedlock still reduces the long-term chances of divorce.”
To these points, Olson notes that the data could be telling us “people in stabler marriages are more likely to have kids in wedlock, or people in less stable (unhappy) marriages tend not to have kids.”
“Keep an open mind when thinking about what could really be driving these correlations with marriage stability,” he said.
What do you think about Olson’s findings, particularly those about age? Do you think marrying someone more than five years older or younger means that you’ll end up filing divorce papers, or is the study too flawed to assign this as a legitimate factor?