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Age at Marriage, Spousal Alternatives, and Marital Dissolution

State University of New York at Albany

Although age at marriage is one of the strongest and most consistent predictors of marital dissolution, few studies have attempted to explain this established association. This analysis merges marital history data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth with 1980 census data describing the quantity of spousal alternatives available to husbands and wives in the local geographic area to test one such explanation. The main hypothesis, derived from the theory of marital search, suggests that persons who marry young will be more likely than those who marry later in life to dissolve their marriage when they encounter abundant alternatives to their current spouse. Discrete-time event history analyses offer no support for this hypothesis. Although the risk of marital dissolution is highest where either husbands or wives chance numerous spousal alternatives, the impact of age at marriage on divorce is significantly weaker in marriage markets containing abundant remarriage opportunities. Some of the effect of age at marriage on marital dissolution is attributable to the detrimental impact of early marriage on educational attainment. Future research directions for explaining the inverse association between age at marriage and the risk of marital dissolution are discussed.

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