It's Better To Wait Before Marriage, But Not Too Long, Study Finds

CHICAGO (CBS) -- The conventional wisdom has long held that taking some time before plunging into marriage reduces the risk of divorce.

A new study by Nicholas H. Wolfinger, a professor at the University of Utah, indicates that's only partially true.

While statistics still show that couples who marry in their teens or early 20s have a much higher divorce rate, couples who wait too long also share a similar risk of a break up.

That's a new trend, Wolfinger found.

The ideal age to marry appears to be when a couple is in their late 20s or early 30s.

Previous research showed that the divorce risk was lowest around 30 and stayed that way, even for people who waited until their late 30s or 40s to get married.

Now, older couples are nearly as likely to divorce as those who married in their early 20s, the study found.

"Most youthful couples simply do not have the maturity, coping skills, and social support it takes to make marriage work. In the face of routine marital problems, teens and young twenty-somethings lack the wherewithal necessary for happy resolutions," Wolfinger wrote.

Then, after the age of 32 "the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent per year."

The reason for this is up for conjecture.

"Perhaps people who marry later face a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony," Wolfinger wrote.

To arrive at his numbers, Wolfinger analyzed data collected between 2006 and 2010 from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG).