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 2025 they were 30.8 and 28.4, about 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.

England and Wales marry later still: the Office for National Statistics put the median age at opposite-sex marriage at 34.8 for men and 33.0 for women in 2023, though that count includes remarriages and so runs above a first-marriage median. 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. Most estimates put the share of first marriages that end in divorce at about 40 to 45%, and Philip Cohen's 2019 analysis in Socius found divorce rates still falling from 2008 to 2017, with lower risk for the most recent marriages. The crude divorce rate hit 5.3 per 1,000 people in 1981 and was down to 2.4 by 2023. 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, though less precisely than the internet suggests. Figures of 60% and 73%, often quoted for second and third marriages, don't trace back to any national survey, so they're left off this page. 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?

Nobody has a reliable national count, and the best research on couples' conflict suggests the count matters less than people think. John Gottman spent three decades observing couples at the University of Washington, and he found 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, and Gottman's 1993 study found couples who mostly avoid conflict among the stable ones. The relationship communication quiz looks at your own patterns in the same terms.

How common is infidelity?

About one in five married men and one in eight 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 in recent waves 20% of ever-married men and 13% of ever-married women say they've had sex with someone other than their spouse while married, according to an Institute for Family Studies analysis.

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, 39% of heterosexual couples had met online, and the authors note that online dating matters even more to gay and lesbian couples, who have fewer people to search among. Pew's 2023 report found three in ten American adults had used a dating site or app, and 53% of those under 30. Meeting through friends fell from 33% in 1995 to 20% in 2017 and through family from 15% to 7%, while meeting in a bar or restaurant rose from 19% to 27%, 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 six adults in ten, and one of three insecure styles for most of the rest. 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 59% secure, 25% avoidant and 11% anxious, close to the first sample. So an insecure style isn't a diagnosis; it's what more than a third of 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 nearly 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 or fewer for about half of Americans, according to the Survey Center on American Life's 2021 report, up from 27% in 1990. The top of the distribution has thinned as well, from 33% with ten or more close friends in 1990 to 13% in 2021. And in 1990, 3% of Americans said they had no close friends at all; by 2021 it was 12%, four times as many. Averages hide that kind of change, which is why the friendship count 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 three or fewer close friends that half of Americans now report sit inside that innermost ring, which on Dunbar's numbers has room for about five. 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 2023 Current Population Survey tables, 35% of opposite-sex married couples are within a year of each other's age, and widening that to three years covers 62% 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 2 to 5 years, the man is older in about 76% of couples; where it's ten years or more, in about 81%. 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?

There's no good population figure for ordinary breakups, and this is the one topic on the page where an average would tell you least, because the spread between people is so wide. Longer relationships take longer, and divorce is a different animal altogether.

Mavis Hetherington followed more than 1,400 families through divorce over three decades, and by six years after the split most of the adults were happier than they had been. 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.