Twenty years and counting...

I like statistics.  To me, numbers have a way of making sense that people (myself included) never seem to.  Numbers geek that I am, I know that I have an average of 37 visitors to this blog, but I also know that it's counting me, my mom, and a few good friends who have the patience to read the ones that don't even interest them very much.  It also seems to be dropping off over time - like anything else, interest wanes and you get busy doing other things - I get that.  I think it's good for me regardless, so on I go.

And yes, this post is going to have a lot of numbers, so hang on tight!  The middle of this month marks 20 years of marriage for Darrell and I, and by the end of the month, he'll be 41 years old along with me.  It got me to wondering where we fit in with the general US population, and thanks to the Census Bureau and various reports on their data, I learned a few things.

First I speculated that divorce rates go down as length of marriage increases, and ta-da, I found the nifty chart above to support my hypothesis!  The cumulative percent divorced essentially flattens after 30 years of marriage, and it's also a lot less steep after 15 to 20 years.  Does that mean I'm safe and can lean back and take my marriage for granted now?  No way!  It has been hard work at times along the way, and while my marriage has generally gotten easier over the years, I don't expect it to ever not take hard work to keep it going strong.

Darrell and I got married at a young age compared to just about anyone else I know, except my parents.  I was 21 (21.4 if you want to compare to the numbers quoted below) and he was 20 (but it would round to 21.0 if you want to compare).  Sure enough, I found a table with the estimated median age of first marriages for men and women by year, with data from 1890 through 2011.  I will spare you the entire chart, but in the year we were married, 1992, the average median age at first marriage for women was 24.4 and men was 26.5.  In 1956, we would have been pretty average (20.1 for women; 22.5 for men), but in 2011, we would have been even more weird than we were (26.5 for women; 28.7 for men).  If you didn't notice, the trend is for couples in the US to get married at older and older ages.

I also wondered what the overall probability of a first marriage lasting 20 years is (I know it sounds absurd to you that anyone would wonder about probabilities, but seriously, I do).  And I found it:  52% for women and 56% for men among 15 to 44-year-olds who married at age 24 or younger.

Suffice it to say that we've made it to a place that many couples do not, and I'm proud of that.  I'm not sure the things I write in this blog help others, but I know that it helps me, and maybe someday some of what I've learned about marriage in the past 20 years will help my children, too.  I certainly hope so.