Thread title basically says it all. Have you known some older than the typical 20s to get married for the first time? How did it work out?
I had a friend who called me up and told me he was doing a statistically improbable thing: he was getting married for the first time at the age of 50.
But they had been living together four about 10 years and owned a house together for a couple of years.
My wife and I got married in our late forties. So far so good.
My Wife and I got married at 36. First marriage. This August will be our 22nd anniversary. We have had one argument in all that time (really a drunk frustrated misunderstanding on my part), so I’m gonna say it’s working pretty well.
YMMV
Wait, getting married after your twenties is so unusual that you have to ask whether people know anyone who did this? I’m pretty sure most of the people I know who are married were thirty or older.
Anyway, I think the oldest person I know to get married for the first time was a college friend of my parents who was in his mid-sixties, although he’s gay and had been in a long-term relationship long before they could legally marry, so I don’t know if that counts.
My cousin married for the second time when she was 42. Her groom was marrying for the first time, he was 51. So far the union has lasted almost twenty=nine years. At the wedding his mom said I finally have lived long enough to see my boy married!
Awoman at my church married for the first time at 74. It was the second marriage for the groom.
My never-married aunt moved to a veterans’ retirement home when she was 80. Met a guy there, and got married at 82. Not long after that, her health started failing, so I don’t think they had a long, happy twilight together.
Then he would get her survivors bennies? Years ago, the auto companies changed the pension system, they started requiring that a spouse of a retired worker didn’t get any bennies until they were married a year. Women who worked in Nursing homes were marrying old guys on their last leg, then when they passed, collecting his pension. Some of these girls had 5 or 6 pensions coming in.
My father married my mother when he was 55.
I got married for the first time at 47.
It’s worked out so far…
I was going to post this same thing about myself. I might have married in my 40’s had it been legal, as it was I was 65. My husband was 67. We’ve been together for 27 years, and so far so good.
I married for the first time at 54.
“The typical 20s”, hah. A lot of Spaniards, for starters: 1. Bro and 1.Sil married at 25 and were the youngest among their group of friends. If I’d married The Bestest Boyfriend, both of us would have been in our 30s. 2.Bro was 40 and 2.SiL turned 49 the day after their wedding (he says it was his trick to remember both dates easily). And while I wasn’t born yet, my great-uncle Jesús was 55 and his bride 56: she was the sister of a former classmate of his, but they had only exchanged a polite introduction back in prehistoric times before Uncle went to their home town for a professional meeting, had lunch with his friend’s family and hit it off with the sister: after three months of daily letters they decided to continue the conversation in person.
Of those, Uncle Julio’s marriage is so far the one that lasted longest: 42 years. The rest are still going strong; more or less up and downs depending on levels of selfishness and dramatism. I know several couples who married young, separated for several years and got back together (in Spain separation is still not necessarily a prelude to divorce, although if a couple has been separated for six months either party can request a divorce and have it granted automatically). I also know a few divorced people but they all married young and I often only know one half of the couple. Note that in Spain “married young” currently means “before 30”.
My college girlfriend got married for the first time at age 48. But, she had come to realize, in the years after she and I had dated, that while she was bisexual, she was more attracted to women. So, she was only able to get married once same-sex marriage had been legalized.
Similarly, my college roommate, who came out as gay in his early 20s, finally got married when he was in his late 40s, to his longtime partner. Had SSM been legal earlier, they would have gotten married far younger, of course.
As far as opposite-sex marriages, the oldest first marriage that I personally know of is one of my wife’s best friends from high school. She didn’t get married until her mid 40s; it was the first marriage for her husband, as well, who was in his early 50s at the time.
Statistically, no. The average age for a person to get married for the first time in 28.2 (in the United States).
Sure it counts. I got married on my 70th birthday, which was also my husband’s 50th. We’ve been together since 1987.
I think there’s a huge difference between a couple who’ve been a couple and lived together for years and decide to get married late in life for reasons that have little to do with the relationship itself (maybe it wasn’t legal before , or they were perfectly content with not being married, but decided to marry so one would have health insurance or would be eligible to collect some other benefit) and someone like an acquaintance of mine, who got married past the age of fifty to someone he met online who lived in another country and whom he had never spent more than a week with. Acquaintance had also never lived with anyone or even had a long-term relationship before.
My husband was 50 when we got married, after knowing each other for a year. Still together after 15 years!
Mrs. ToKnow was 41 when we married. I was 45, but it wasn’t my first.
I know a woman whose first marriage was in her forties to a guy in his late fifties. I don’t think it was his first marriage though - he has kids. They’ve been together pretty happily for 15 or so years. His medical problems are a bit of a drag for her though.
I know another couple who was just married. Wife is 42 and husband is 50. The marriage is so new that I can’t say whether they will have a long, happy one but they have a lot working against them. Both spouses are very traditional. They barely know each other. They are both very close to and deferential to their parents and their parents believe their kids could do better. The parents support the marriage only because they are acceding to reality that if their kids are going to have children, they have to start now. The spouses have different expectations for post-married life and career. They don’t want to live in the same state. They have immigration problems. The husband is an old-fashioned jerk. The list goes on. The only thing that might keep them together is that they are too conservative to really contemplate divorce. Or you know, maybe they’ll actually fall in love.