Age at Marriage

The article presents an overview of trends in cohabitation and marriage in Britain over several decades, using a consistent set of retrospective histories from the General Household Survey 1979–2007. Time-trends are presented, for men and women, of: the experience of different types of partnership by specified ages, the frequency of premarital cohabitation, the average time spent in different types of partnership, the timing of life course transitions, and the outcome of cohabitation and marriage at the fifth and tenth anniversaries.

Assumptions about the ‘typical’ age gap between spouses underlie much social policy (e.g. the fi ve-year difference in men’s and women’s state pension ages). In order to test the basis for these assumptions, detailed marriage registration statistics were obtained for 1963 and 1998, for England and Wales. Age differences between spouses were calculated and analysed by year, age at marriage and previous marital status. The median age gap hardly changed between 1963 and 1998 but this concealed considerable increase in the proportion of marriages where the man was younger than the woman or – to a lesser extent – where the man was six or more years older.