There have been some naysayers of the findings, notably Phillip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. He has found a slightly older “perfect marriage” age range, using different data than Wolfinger. He found there’s, ultimately, no reason to worry if you get married later on. Cohen’s stats were from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, sent out to 295,000 American households per month to collect ongoing data on social, economic, and housing characteristics of individual communities.
And here’s another very important thing to point out about Wolfinger’s study: It only looks at divorce during the first five years after marriage, says psychologist Karla Ivankovich, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Ideally, a marriage is going to last longer than half a decade. “So there is still possibility of divorce, just not in the time frame identified within the study,” she tells Yahoo Health.