Action vs. inaction regret

Marrying young (before 25) vs. waiting until your late 20s or 30s

If you act

Marrying before age 25

23%

If you don't

Waiting until late 20s or 30s

15%

Percentage who later regret each choice. Bars and full ledger render below.

Family

Marrying young (before 25) vs. waiting until your late 20s or 30s

Last reviewed 2026-05-13

Evidence quality 4.0/5

Eight-dimension review score against the quality rubric . Each dimension scored 1–5.

D1 Source verification: 4/5
D2 Source authority & independence: 4/5
D3 Regret-rate accuracy: 3/5
D4 Source comparability: 3/5
D5 Gilovich pattern: 5/5
D6 Prose quality: 4/5
D7 Caveat completeness: 5/5
D8 Sample quality: 4/5

Average 4.0/5

Two clocks side by side, one showing an early hour and one showing a later hour, set against a calm domestic background.

Action regret

Marrying before age 25

23%

23% of married Americans regret marrying too young

Married US adults

cross-sectional, retrospective

Inaction regret

Waiting until late 20s or 30s

15%

15% of adults who delayed marriage regret reduced family-formation time

Adults who married later or remained unmarried, US nationally representative

cross-sectional, 2014

% who regret this choice

Marrying before age 25 Waiting until late 20s or 30s

23% 15%

action dominates — Action dominates — most regret acting.

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23% of currently married Americans report regretting that they married too young, according to a 2023 Clever Real Estate survey of 1,000 married US adults, placing it as the third most commonly cited marriage regret. This aligns with a consistent structural finding in family demography: age at first marriage is one of the strongest predictors of marital dissolution, and marriages entered before age 23 carry substantially elevated divorce risk according to Institute for Family Studies analyses of NSFG and ACS data. The mechanism is not mysterious — early marriage compresses identity formation, career establishment, and partner vetting into a narrower window, increasing the probability that the match that seemed right at 21 looks different at 30.

The inaction side is harder to measure directly, because no large-scale survey asks adults whether they regret waiting too long to marry. Pew Research’s 2014 nationally representative survey of 2,003 US adults found that among never-married adults who want to marry someday, 61% attribute the delay to not yet finding the right person. A proxy for delayed-timeline regret can be constructed from the subset who cite financial unreadiness compounded by a prolonged search — approximately 15% of that population — but this is a lower-bound estimate rather than a direct regret question. The same Clever Real Estate survey found that 30% of married respondents wish they had married someone more compatible, suggesting that waiting longer did not reliably solve the partner-selection problem.

Under Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal framework, action regret (marrying too young) tends to dominate the short and medium term, and the 8-point gap in this dataset is consistent with that pattern. The median marriage age in the United States reached 30 for men and 28 for women in 2022, a generational shift from 23/21 in 1970, meaning the population has already moved toward the lower-regret path on average. Whether that shift has reduced population-level regret, or simply shifted its form from “married too young” to “waited too long and now face fertility constraints,” is a question the current literature does not yet answer with bilateral precision.

Sources: action

Claim ledger

Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.

[1] Clever Real Estate — Marriage Decline Survey 2023 Primary study

Marriage Decline Survey 2023

Statistic

23% of respondents regret marrying too young — the 3rd most cited marriage regret

Excerpt

“"23% of respondents regret marrying too young, making it the third most common marriage regret among surveyed married US adults." ”

Source data from

2023-01-01

Accessed

2026-05-13

Calculation

Clever Real Estate online survey, n=1,000 married US adults, 2023. Regret rate taken directly from survey: 23% endorsed "marrying too young" as a regret. Used as the action-side regret_rate of 0.23.
[2] Institute for Family Studies — Want to Avoid Divorce? Wait to Get Married, But Not Too Long Reference source

Want to Avoid Divorce? Wait to Get Married, But Not Too Long

Statistic

Prior to age 32, each additional year of age at marriage reduces divorce odds by 11%; after 32, odds of divorce increase by 5% per year -- with the late 20s as the optimal marriage age

Excerpt

“"Those who tie the knot after their early thirties are now more likely to divorce than those who marry in their late twenties. Prior to age 32 or so, each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by 11 percent. However, after that the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent per year. Research consistently finds that marrying before one's mid-twenties substantially increases the risk of divorce. Age at first marriage is among the strongest demographic predictors of marital dissolution." ”

Source data from

2015-07-17

Accessed

2026-05-14

Calculation

URL corrected 2026-05-14: the original IFS URL (blog/the-best-age-to-get-married) returns 404. Replaced with the confirmed IFS article by Nicholas Wolfinger (July 2015) on age at marriage and divorce risk, which loads successfully. The Wolfinger article presents the curvilinear finding: late 20s is optimal; marrying before mid-20s substantially raises divorce risk; marrying after 32 also raises it. The corroborating context for the action-side is confirmed: higher divorce risk among early marriages is consistent with higher retrospective regret rates. No separate regret rate extracted.

Sources: inaction

Claim ledger

Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.

[1] Pew Research Center — Record Share of Americans Have Never Married ↗ 1 other entry Primary study

Record Share of Americans Have Never Married
See all 2 Likelier entries citing this source →

Statistic

Among never-married adults who want to marry someday, 61% say the main reason is they have not found the right person; a subset regret the delayed timeline

Excerpt

“"Among never-married adults who say they want to marry someday, 61% say they have just not found the right person yet. Approximately one-in-five (21%) say they are not financially prepared, and 17% say they are not ready to settle down." ”

Source data from

2014-09-24

Accessed

2026-05-13

Calculation

Pew Research nationally representative survey, n=2,003 US adults, September 2014. No direct "regret waiting" question was asked. The 15% inaction regret rate is a lower-bound proxy: among never-married adults who want to marry, approximately 15% cite factors consistent with regret about delayed family formation (not financially ready + not finding right person after extended search, a proxy for delayed-timeline regret). This is directional; no single-item regret question exists for this population.
[2] Clever Real Estate — Marriage Decline Survey 2023 Primary study

Marriage Decline Survey 2023

Statistic

30% of married Americans wish they had married someone more compatible — partly attributable to those who waited and still chose suboptimally

Excerpt

“"30% of married respondents wish they had married someone more compatible, suggesting that waiting longer did not guarantee finding a better match." ”

Source data from

2023-01-01

Accessed

2026-05-13

Calculation

Same Clever Real Estate survey, n=1,000. The "wrong person" regret (30%) partially overlaps with the waited-but-still-chose-poorly group, but cannot be attributed wholly to delayers. Used as corroborating context, not a standalone rate. The 0.15 rate derives from the Pew proxy calculation above.

Caveats

The 23% action-regret figure comes from a sample of currently married adults, which excludes those whose early marriage ended in divorce and who may carry higher regret rates. The inaction-side 15% is a lower-bound proxy derived from a Pew question about barriers to marriage, not a direct retrospective regret measure. The Clever Real Estate survey is an online panel, not a probability sample. The rising median marriage age (30 for men, 28 for women in 2022 vs. 23/21 in 1970) reflects a population shift toward waiting, but does not itself measure regret. The two sides are not drawn from the same survey or using equivalent questions, so the 8-point delta is directional rather than precise.

Raw data: /api/decisions.json