4 Facts About Marriage In The 21st Century

From the quirky to the socially and economically revealing, here are some interesting facts about modern marriages

1. Men with college degrees are more likely to get married, according to a CNN article. “There’s a double whammy going on for the people who aren’t college-educated,” Richard Fry, a senior research associate at the Pew Research Center, told CNN. “They are facing difficult employment, and they are less likely to enter into marriage and receive the economic benefits marriage provides.”

2. Getting married after you graduate college can keep you lean, according to a study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. “People who get married before they earn a degree from a four-year college are about 65 percent more likely to later become obese than people who get married after college,” Richard Allen Miech, a research professor at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. “While a college degree has long been shown to be associated with lower levels of obesity, the results of this study indicate that the health benefits of college do not accrue to people who get married before graduating.”

3. Men with college degrees don’t divorce as often as men who only have high school diplomas, according to a recent article by the blog Market Watch. ?A college degree is a good proxy indicator for economic resources,? said Susan Brown, professor and chair of sociology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, in the Market Watch article. ?Highly educated couples enjoy more financial stability. Economic distress is a key predictor of divorce. Having plenty of money means one less thing to fight about.?

4. A college education no longer holds women back from getting married, according to Newsweek. “Marriage rates in the U.S. for college-educated women have risen enormously since the 1950s,” Betsey Stevenson, an economist, told Newsweek. “In 1950, less than three quarters of white college-educated women went on to marry by age 40 [compared with 90 percent of high-school graduates]. But today, 86 percent marry by age 40, compared with 88 percent of high-school grads.”