When people first marry, they tend to pick someone pretty close to their age. When they try marriage again, however, the gap tends to get way wider, according to data from the Pew Research Center. And that gap is different depending on which gender you're looking at: when people remarry (in different-sex couples, that is), the wives get younger and the husbands get older.
When men remarry, they go way younger. Women pick someone older.
The data, which doesn’t include same-sex couples, shows that men and women alike tend to stray further outside their own age bracket for remarriages than for first marriages. However, men are way more likely to go for younger women the second (or third, or fourth) time around.
Source: Pew Research Center
15 percent of men marry someone six or more years younger than them for their first marriages, but that’s only true of 3 percent of women. For second marriages, men are much more likely to go younger: 38 percent of men choose a significantly younger woman, compared to 11 percent of women.
Women, meanwhile, get far more likely to seek out someone older when they decide to remarry. 27 percent of women go much older the second (or third) time around, compared to 6 percent of men.
This isn’t a small population we’re looking at here, either; according to Pew, in 40 percent of marriages today, one or both partners had been married before. But the desire to remarry is also unequal across genders. When Pew asked divorced and widowed people if they would like to remarry, only 30 percent of men said no, compared to 54 percent of women.
[h/t Wonkblog]
See More:
