Alessandro Bianch / Reuters George Clooney, 52, married Amal Alamuddin, 37, back in September.

If you're going to move in with or marry your beau, the research suggests you should wait until age 23.

It will put the odds in your favor, according to a 2014 study by Arielle Kuperberg, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

From 11 years of responses in the US National Surveys of Family Growth, Kuperberg gathered marriage status data for over 7,000 married Americans — some who later divorced, some who stayed together.



Age turned out to be a major predictor of divorce:

• People who cohabited or married at age 18 had a 60% divorce rate.

• People who cohabited or married at age 23 had about a 30% divorce rate.

That's a 50% reduction in divorce, thanks to just waiting five more years.

Not only that, but Kuperberger's research countered the commonly held belief that moving in together before wedlock was "bad" for a relationship.

"For so long, the link between cohabitation and divorce was one of these great mysteries in research," Kuperberg told the Atlantic . "What I found was that it was the age you settled down with someone, not whether you had a marriage license, that was the biggest indicator of a relationship's future success."

The hard truth here, backed up by the literature, is that people under 23 aren't mature enough to select the right partner.

Compatibility, as we've learned, has layers of complexity.

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