Skip to main content
Marital Paradigms Study

Findings from Year Three​

**All data below is based on data collected from year three of the study unless otherwise specified.**

​

What is the Ideal Age to Get Married?

​​What do you think is the best age to get married? One of the most consistent research statistics related to marriage and marital beliefs is the idea that the age 25 is the most ideal age to get married. Our own research shows that between ages 24-28 are the most ideal ages to get married. Among the young adults who do believe there is an ideal age, over 60% reported that ideal as being between the age of 24 and 28. Interestingly, this is a few years younger than when most young adults will actually marry.

Expected Age of Marriage

How does the age you expect to get married impact your life? Does this matter? This is one of the main goals of this study. We would like to see if when you expect to get married is related to how you live your life. Previous research on this subject has shown a significant relationship between the two. Here are the averages of when each of you expects to marry. It appears that there is a good spread ranging from 21-30+, but there is a slight increase between ages 26-27 of when you expect to get married.

Do You Feel Ready To Get Married?

​Many young adults have fears and anxieties about marriage and many of these fears center on if one is "ready." While being ready for marriage might mean different things to different people, we hope to understand how this "readiness" to marry impacts your life. The data is showing that it's about a 60/40 split among our sample where a little less than half of you feel ready to get married while more than half of you do not.

​​

If we look further at the data, you can see that the majority of people lie on the "disagree" side. There could be many reasons for these results. This is a very interesting trend that runs counter to what we typically see in science (where "bell shaped" or "normal" curves—with most people in the middle​​—are common). These results suggest that many of you feel unprepared to marry. We hope to further understand these feelings as we continue with our study.

​

Does Marriage Take Hard Work?​ ​

As you can see from the results, the belief is pretty universal that you need to work hard in order to achieve happiness in marriage. Virtually all the young adults we surveyed believed that being happy in a marriage would require hard work. Along with this finding, most of those surveyed did not believe that working hard at a marriage means that it is bad. Clearly, most young adults believe that happy marriages will not simply happen without putting in effort and energy.​

Relationship Landmarks


In each relationship, there are certain landmarks that you reach as a couple. Are these relationship landmarks important to reach before you commit to marriage? As you can see from the results, there is some ambiguity present as to the importance of reaching these landmarks. While many young adults now live together at least once prior to marriage, our results suggest little agreement on if this is a needed step before marriage. Likewise, although most young adults will have engaged in premarital sex prior to marriage, there was again disagreement regarding if such behavior was important prior to marriage.

​​

Changes Over Time

Of course your opinions and beliefs about marriage have changed over time. We have created comparison charts from all three years of data collection. Here, you can see a side-by-side comparison of all the data we have collected on selected topics. These changes over time may have come from new beliefs about marriage due to maturation, relationship changes, or a number of other variables. Whatever the reason, it is evident that the opinions of all those surveyed have changed over time.

Is Marriage Your Top Priority?

Our results would suggest that over time, more of our participants considered marriage to be their top priority in life. This change could be due to age changes and new priorities coming up over time. Many students do not see marriage as a top priority in life, but upon graduation the results seem to show that more of you are ready to get married.

​Relationship Landmarks Over Time

Overall, it looks like the majority of our participants more strongly desired their partners to have reached the relationship landmarks of living together before marriage and to have had sex with their partner before marriage as more time had passed. This trend is an interesting finding because we can see a dramatic shift in these aspects of relationships from year two to year three.

​​​What Have We Done?

Throughout the course of our study, we have learned a great deal about our research participants and about how emerging adults view marriage. Below are abstracts to some of our published works based on the data we have collected from this study. Feel free to read and share our findings.

EA_ChangesinBeliefs_Proofs.pdf
​EA_online_Paradigm Types.pdf
JFEI 2014 proof.pdf
Centrality_JofPresubmissiondraft_accept.docx