Relationship statistics: what the data actually shows

What is the average age to get married?

Older than ever, and still rising. The Census Bureau has tracked the median age at first marriage since 1890, and for seventy years the line has gone one way. Men and women both marry far later than their parents did, and the climb got steeper after 1990 rather than levelling off.

In 1950 the median groom was 22.8 and the median bride 20.3. By 2024 they were 30.5 and 28.6, nearly eight years older on both sides. More people finish degrees first, most couples live together before they marry, and a lot of them wait until they can afford a home, so the wedding has moved from the start of adult life to somewhere in the middle of it.

Britain runs about three years behind, or ahead, depending on how you look at it: the Office for National Statistics puts the median at roughly 33.4 for men and 31.5 for women. If you married at 26 you were early by today's standards and late by your grandmother's. The relationship timeline calculator and the when to propose calculator place your own dates against these medians.

How common is divorce?

Less common than the famous "half of all marriages" line, and getting rarer. CDC figures and Philip Cohen's 2019 analysis in Socius put the share of first marriages that end in divorce at about 40 to 45%, and the number has been falling since it peaked in the early 1980s. The crude divorce rate hit 5.3 per 1,000 people in 1981 and was down to about 2.5 by the early 2020s. That 50% figure was a projection made at the top of that curve, and it has never come true.

Almost all of the improvement belongs to graduates. Divorce among college-educated couples has fallen sharply since the 1980s, while among couples without degrees it stayed higher and came down more slowly, so a single national rate now describes two quite different marriage markets.

Which marriage it is matters too. About 60% of second marriages end in divorce and about 73% of third ones, not because remarriage is cursed but because the people in them have already shown they'll leave a marriage that isn't working. The divorce probability calculator weighs your own circumstances, and signs your marriage is over covers what the research says about marriages in trouble.

How often do couples argue?

One to three times a month, for most couples in stable relationships. That's from John Gottman's three decades of work with thousands of couples at the University of Washington, still the most careful data on conflict there is. What he found is that how often you argue predicts very little; what you do while arguing predicts a great deal.

About 69% of the things couples fight about never get resolved. Gottman calls them perpetual problems: one of you spends and one saves, one wants the house tidy and one doesn't notice, you disagree about the children. The couples who last aren't the ones who settle these, because nobody does. They're the ones who can have the same argument for the twentieth time with some humour left, instead of contempt or a wall of silence.

The number Gottman is best known for is 5 to 1. Stable couples log about five positive moments for every negative one during a disagreement; couples heading for divorce manage about 0.8. It isn't the fights that sink a marriage, it's the ratio around them. The relationship communication quiz looks at your own patterns in the same terms.

How common is infidelity?

Somewhere between one in five and one in four married men, and between one in ten and one in seven married women, admit to it. The General Social Survey has asked the same question since 1991, which makes it the longest-running national measure of infidelity in the US, and across its waves 20 to 25% of married men and 10 to 15% of married women say they've had sex with someone other than their spouse while married.

Take those as floors. People under-report affairs to interviewers, and fully anonymous surveys come back higher, especially for younger women, which suggests the gap between the sexes is closing. Age matters as well: the longer someone has been married, the more years there have been in which it could have happened, so older respondents report higher lifetime rates without necessarily behaving any differently.

The number also depends on what you count. Ask about emotional affairs rather than only sex and every group's rate jumps. The GSS figures are strictly about sex, so if your definition is wider, the true rate for your definition is higher. Our infidelity calculator shows how the GSS rates break down by age and sex and what they say about risk.

What percentage of couples meet online?

More than any other single route. Rosenfeld, Thomas and Hausen tracked how American couples met from the 1990s to the late 2010s for their 2019 paper in PNAS, and found that meeting online overtook meeting through friends around 2013. The gap has only widened since. Introductions by friends, the way couples had met for a century, are now the thing in decline.

By 2017 about 39% of heterosexual couples and more than 65% of same-sex couples had met online. Pew's 2023 survey found more than 30% of American adults had used a dating app, and 53% of those under 30. Bars and mutual friends have faded in step, while work and social circles still account for a fair share, so the offline routes haven't vanished, they've just stopped being the default.

It changes who ends up with whom, not only how. Couples who met online are a little more likely to be of different ethnicities and to have lived further apart than couples who met through friends, because the app doesn't care who your friends know. The dating pool calculator shows how many people your own filters leave you with, and how many dates before sex covers what happens after the match.

What are the most common attachment styles?

Secure, for about half of adults, and one of three insecure styles for the other half. The idea comes from John Bowlby's work on infants, carried into adult romance by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver in a 1987 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: the way you were cared for early on leaves a characteristic way of handling closeness later. Researchers now work with four styles.

Hazan and Shaver's first sample came out about 56% secure, 25% avoidant and 19% anxious. Ten years later Mickelson, Kessler and Shaver put the question to a national sample of more than 8,000 adults and found roughly half secure, and study after study since has landed near the same place. So an insecure style isn't a diagnosis; it's what half the room has.

Styles are fairly stable but not fixed. A long good relationship, therapy or a hard life event can move someone, usually towards secure. They predict how satisfied people are, how they fight and whether they turn to a partner when things go wrong. The attachment style quiz uses the validated items, and the love languages test covers a different and less well evidenced way of describing the same terrain.

How long do people date before getting engaged?

Two to three years, then another 15 months engaged. The Knot's 2023 Real Weddings Study asked more than 10,000 recently married American couples, and the road from first date to wedding came out at roughly four to five years for most of them. Both halves of that are longer than in the same survey twenty years earlier.

Most of those couples were already living together. More than 70% of couples married in the last decade shared a home before the wedding, which reverses what the marriage statistics looked like a generation ago. Whether that helps or hurts has been argued over for years: early studies found cohabiting couples divorced more, but once researchers separated couples who moved in before getting engaged from those who moved in after, the effect mostly disappeared.

The timings shift with education, age and where you live, and graduates take longer at every stage, both before the proposal and between it and the wedding. Our when to propose calculator, the moving in together timeline and the relationship timeline calculator each put one of these milestones against the survey data.

How many close friends does the average person have?

Three to five, according to the Survey Center on American Life's 2021 report, and that average has barely moved in thirty years. What has moved is the bottom of the distribution. In 1990, 3% of Americans said they had no close friends at all; by 2021 it was 12%, four times as many, while the average sat still. Averages hide that kind of change, which is why the calculator shows you the whole curve.

Friend counts fall with age, and the sharpest drop comes in the early thirties when careers, partners and children arrive together and take the evenings with them. Men have lost more ground than women: the share of men with no close friends went from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021, one man in seven.

Robin Dunbar's work on the social brain suggests we can keep meaningful contact with about 150 people, with inner rings of roughly 15 good friends and 5 intimates. The survey's 3 to 5 is that innermost ring, and on Dunbar's numbers it's close to full rather than sparse. Our adult friendship statistics page goes through the Pew data on how the count changes across a lifetime.

What is the average age gap in relationships?

Small. In the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, the most common gap between spouses is 0 to 2 years, about a third of all married couples, and widening that to 0 to 3 years covers roughly half of them. A gap of ten years or more turns up in about 8% of marriages, so it's unusual without being rare.

The man is usually the older one, and the bigger the gap the more usual that gets. Where the gap is 1 to 5 years, the man is older in about 64% of couples; where it's ten years or more, in about 76%. Some of that is old custom and some is arithmetic about who is single at which age.

Younger couples are evening it out. Among adults under 35 the woman is the older partner more often than in any earlier generation, and attitudes to gaps of every kind have relaxed. The age gap calculator shows where your own gap sits and how common it is for couples your age.

How long does it take to get over a breakup?

Three to six months for most people after a relationship of under two years, though this is the one topic on the page where the average tells you least, because the spread between people is so wide. Longer relationships take longer, and divorce is a different animal altogether.

Mavis Hetherington's long-running studies of divorce put real emotional and practical recovery at 12 to 18 months on average, with a fair number of people needing two years or more. Three things reliably speed it up: being the one who ended it, no infidelity having been involved, and having people around you.

The tidy "stages of grief" model doesn't hold up well in the data. What the studies describe is a jagged line: weeks of feeling better, then an anniversary, a chance meeting or a photo on someone's feed knocks you back, then better again. The breakup recovery calculator puts your own timeline against the research, and the should I break up quiz is for people who haven't got that far yet.