I want to preface this article with the disclaimer that results I am reporting are only as good as the data I collected.  If the parties were not married in Minnesota, I could not find the date of marriage from publicly accessible records.  Thus, there was no way to calculate the ages of the parties at marriage, the length of the marriage or their ages at divorce.  These cases were omitted from the sample.

Secondly, the data is only as good as what was entered into the Minnesota online court records. If the court staff who entered in the birthdates of the parties did not accurately enter the date, my data could ultimately also be incorrect.  Third, based on my research, it appears the court transferred its case records from paper files to computer files in the 1980s.  It was incredibly difficult to find full files from the early 1980s.  It probably took as long to get a comprehensive sample from the 1980s as it did for the other decades combined.  Finally, I am not a statistician.  I am a family law attorney.  Therefore this won’t be an article containing statistical probabilities. It has been twenty years since I took my college statistics course and I need a refresher before engaging in any further analysis of the data

I decided to start with the most popular belief of the “seven-year itch.”  The belief is that relationship satisfaction declines around the seventh year together.  If this is true, I would expect most divorces to occur close to seven years after marriage.  However, I do not know how long the couples were in a committed relationship prior to marriage.  According to the belief, if a couple were in a committed relationship four years prior to marriage they would divorce in the third year of marriage.  This skews the interpretation of the data because I had no way to account for the length of the premarital relationship.

For purposes of this article, I found out the average length of marriage before divorcing actually increased through the decades.  In the 1980s, the average length of marriage prior to divorce was 9.6 years.  This increased to 11.65 years in the 1990s, remained fairly consistent in the 2000s at 11.74 years and jumped to an average length of 13.46 years in the 2000s.

When I examined all decades together, 30.13 percent of the divorces occurred between five and nine years of marriage.  This was followed by 22.05 percent of divorces occurring between one and five years of marriage.  Further analysis showed that One Hundred Seventy Four (174) of the total divorces occurred in the seventh year of marriage or 6.3 percent.  Is there a seven-year itch in Minnesota?  Based on my research, the correlation between divorces around year 7 in Minnesota is negligible.

The next popular notion I decided to look into is whether or not people are waiting to get married until later in life. For this, I examined the average age of the bride and groom at marriage by decade.  Just because I was curious, I also looked at the youngest and oldest brides/grooms and divorceés. It appears that both males and females are waiting to get married until later in life.  Since Minnesota did not legalize same sex marriage until August 1, 2013, insufficient data is available to determine whether or not the same trend exists for same sex couples.  Consistent throughout the decades is that brides are generally younger than the grooms, an average of two (2) years.

In the 1980s, the average age of brides was 23 years of age. By the 2010s, the average age of a bride increased to 28 years old.  The same held true for grooms. In the 1980s, the average age of a groom was 25.5 years old and by the 2010s, this increased to an average of almost 30 years of age.

I also wanted to examine the age of the youngest bride and groom from each decade and determine if the trend to wait later in life to get married applied to these outliers.  Research demonstrated that the ages of the youngest bride and groom also follow the trend.

For instance, in the 1980s divorces, the youngest bride and youngest groom were both fourteen (14) years old (the parties got married in 1956).  In the 1990s, our youngest bride and groom were 16.2 and 17.4 years old respectively.  By the time Minnesota came into the millennium, our youngest bride and groom matured to 17 years old and 18 years old respectively.

Finally, in the 2010s, our youngest bride and groom were both adults, the youngest bride being 20.4 years old and the youngest groom being 20.5 years old.

Even though Minnesotans are getting married later in life, a majority of the marriages occur under age thirty. This remains consistent throughout the decades.  The average percentages of those getting married in each age range is demonstrated in the chart.

What about the divorceés?  I suspected that since people were waiting until later in life to get married, the probability follows that people getting divorced would also be older.  The data confirmed that the average age of people getting divorced also increased  through the decades.

For instance, in the 1980s, the average age of a divorced female was 32.33 years old.  By the 2010s, the average age of the female divorceé increased to 39.81 years old.  In the 1980s, the average divorced male was 36 years old and by the 2010s, the average age of a male divorceé increased to 42.33 years old.

Finally, I wanted to see if the increase in the average life expectancy resulted in divorces later in life.  According to research, (2) in 1960, the average American life expectancy at birth was 70.1 years.  By 2015, the average American life expectancy at birth was 78.9 years of age.

So how did this transfer to divorces in Minnesota?  The trend was fascinating.  In the 1980s, the oldest female that got divorced was 68.2 years old.  This increased to 72.9 years old the 90s.  The millennium presented an anomaly, with a drop in the oldest female divorcee down to 63 years old. From 2010-2019, the oldest female to get a divorce in Minnesota was 83.4 years old.

Data for the oldest males followed a different trend.  In the 80s, the oldest male getting divorced was 76 years old.  In the 90s and 2000s the oldest male divorcee decreased to 68.4 and 63.9 years old respectively.   From 2010-2019, the oldest male getting divorced was the ripe old age of 88.5 years old.

The next thing I wanted to see if whether or not the husband or wife files for divorce more often and the trend on co-petitioning spouses.  Overwhelmingly the wife files for divorce more often than the husband and this was constant throughout the decades. Seventy percent of divorces in the 1980s were filed by the Wife.  This decreased to sixty-two percent in the 2010s.  Co-petitioning spouses increased from one percent in the 80s to 4.5 percent by the 2010s.

It also did not surprise me that more people filing for divorce had children than those without.  About 74 percent of the divorces from the sample set in the 1980s were with children. This increased in the 90s and 2000s to 84 percent and 78 percent respectively.  By the 2010s, there was a decrease in divorces with children to 67 percent.

Earlier in this article, I mentioned that the average bride was two years younger than the groom.  This got me thinking. What is the shortest, longest and average age gaps between spouses?  Did this change over the years?  The results were interesting, to say the least.

The shortest age gap between a husband and wife was 2 days in every decade but the 2000s, where there was one case of a husband and wife born on the same day.  I suspected this was a data entry error in court administration, yet I could not find any other information online of different birth dates.

The longest age gap was in the 1980s, where the husband was 39.2 years older than his wife. The largest age gaps between a husband and wife in the other decades was less, with 23 years in the 1990s, 30 years in the 2000s, and 27 years in the 2010s.

Based on the sample data, most of the Minnesotans getting divorced are between two and five years apart. Forty-two percent of the sample set involved an age gap of two years or less between the two spouses.  Almost 33 percent fall in the 2-5 year age gap and the remaining 27 percent are more than five years apart.

My final data dive in this project was to determine what month of the year most Minnesotans get married.  Folklore indicates that the “June bride” is popular in western culture for several reasons:

1. if a woman gave birth in June, she would be recovered in time for fall harvest;
2. in the Middle Ages, Europeans believed bathing increased the chance of disease so nobility bathed only a few times a year and pheasants bathed only one time per year, typically in the late spring (so people would smell better for their wedding)
3. Europeans were primarily Christian and weddings were prohibited during the Lenten season
4. bathing became more popular in the Eighteenth century and along with the Regency era came the flowered wreaths adorned the heads of Regency brides.  Victorians used flowers to convey specific meanings and June provided the best selection of flowers.(3)

It surprised me that in Minnesota, the June bride tied with an August bride, with 13 percent of weddings occurring both months.  September followed behind at 11.78 percent of weddings and a close fourth month was July with an average of 10.56 percent of the weddings occurring during this summer month.

Data showed other popular dates of New Year’s Eve; Valentine’s Day and Christmas Day as wedding dates.  January is the least popular month to get married, followed by March.

I did not learn how to bake bread during the pandemic. I did not have any Netflix binges or spend time doing traditional mediation.  However, this research provided an excellent distraction to the chaos of the pandemic.  Whether or not you practice family law, the concept of family touches each of your lives in one way or another.  I hope my pandemic project provides you with fodder for an interesting conversation at family holidays or a get together with friends.

(1) Minnesota Official Marriage System – MACO/MOMS® (https://www.moms.mn.gov)
(2) Medina, Lauren D., Shannon Sabo, and Jonathan Vespa, “Living Longer: Historical and Projected Life Expectancy in the United States, 1960 to 2060,” P25-1145, Current Population Reports, P25-1145, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, 2020. (online) https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1145.pdf
(3) The Tradition of the June Bride, June 1, 2016 (online) (last accessed April 16, 2022)
https://brombergs.com/the-tradition-of-the-june-bride/

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