Age Difference in Marriage

In class we discussed reasoning as to why it seems that men will prefer to marry younger women and women will search for older men to take care of them. The reasons that were discussed were financial support, a sense of maturity, and various other things that were all very good reasons, but one reason that was not said in class is that it has been this way for over a century. In doing research on the topic I found articles that enlightened me on the topic and just how long this has been happening. In an article by Harriet Presser of Columbia University it was found that this trend can be traced back to the 1890's and maybe even further. At the beginning of the 20th century this trend was seen through the average first marriage age, which was about 26 for males and 22 for females. As the decades passed the age for females stayed near the same while for males the age decreased. In the older days older men were usually more established than younger males in most situations, but in today's society it is very common for young men to be financially stable at an earlier age due to college experiences and various other things that could lead to wealth at a young age. Although the ages are becoming close, it was found that many women still prefer marrying older men for all of those reasons discussed in class, but it is not uncommon for marriages of the same age to happen at the same rate as those of spouses who have different ages.

An interesting thing that I found is the age difference in remarried couples is greater than that of first marriages. Another interesting thing is that in a lot of these remarried couples a child was born during the first marriage with a partner of the same age, but in the remarriage with the older partner having children was very rare. So although the women who marry these older men want them for their financial support and maturity, most times having children with them is out of the picture for women.

The last very interesting thing that I found is the age difference between parents in different situations. In a study that was done in New York City in the early 1970's, the father was older than the mother by four or more years mostly when the conception of the child was premarital. When the father was under three years older than the mother the majority of children were conceived during a marriage. This was a very interesting statistic to me and I found it ironic that women usually remarry with older men but in this study the older men were the ones who were having children who were conceived before marriage.