Recently, I’ve been pondering dating odds. As you get older, more and more people are in relationships - sure, some fail, but eventually some people get it right and are removed from the dating pool. Does that mean that your chances go down? Or does a smaller pool of singles actually improve your odds?
While I might discuss that deep (and potentially depressing) question another day, it lead to me pondering another question: what fraction of a people are in relationships? In particular, what would a graph of the percentage of people in a relationship at different ages look like? A logical guess might be something like this:
Figure 1
No one dates for ages less than about 10 (I hope!) Then the percentage slowly increases as relationships slowly stick before eventually plateauing out after age 60, say. (Let’s ignore death. For now.)
Thinking more, though, I wondered whether there would be more features to the graph - specific points where the percentage rises faster or slower or where, on average, people are actually breaking up more than they are getting together, so that we would see an actual dip.
I had two ideas: one such time might be after high school - perhaps relationships peak in Year 12 (age 17), then slowly fail as people grow apart, move, go to University, etc. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of high school relationships fail after 5-7 years, which might mean a dip around age 23-25. Secondly, you could conceive a dip at around age 40-50 in the “mid life crisis” phase. A new graph might then look like this:
Figure 2
Of course, it might be that even if these effects were real, they could be too small to notice when averaged over enough people. What I wanted to do was to test this with some real data, which is tricky. The Australian Census records marital status, but only as Single/Married/Divorced (or De Facto through Dwelling information questions). That’s not enough for want I want though.
Then, I stumbled upon a blog post (inspired by yet another post) that looked at the demographics of Facebook members. Turns out, this data is made available to potential advertisers - and so pretending to be interested in advertising my next party to 3 million Australians, I started gathering data about males and females in Australia and their relationship status. I’ll give you the results first, then talk caveats (of which there are many).
I looked up males and females in Australia on 21/05/08, who listed their relationship status as either “Single”, “In a Relationship”, “Engaged” or “Married”. (Anyone who selected nothing or “It’s complicated” are not included; see below for a discussion.) There are markedly more women than men on Facebook:
Figure 3
Yes, I went with the stereotypical colours - don’t hold it against me! There’s a pretty decent sample size up to age 40, and even up to age 50 isn’t bad, so I hoped to be able to pull some decent stats out. To compare ages, I looked at the percentage of men and women at each age listed as in a relationship. Let’s look at the women first:
Figure 4
The shaded red area is the percentage of women who are listed as not single for each age, and the lines show how relationships, engagements and marriages contribute to that. First of all, I was roughly right in my overall shape - it starts at low (though not zero - but we’re starting at age 13!), increases, then roughly plateaus (although you also can’t trust the last 10 years or so: small numbers = large errors).
Also nice is that the peaks in the separate types of relationships are sequential: relationships peak at around 22, engagements at 27 and marriages from 35 onwards. Of course, you can’t naively assume that the individuals of that first relationship peak end up in the marriage column, but it does neatly reflect the different stages of life and love (awwww).
My hoped-for post-high-school dip hasn’t appeared (unless you really squint at the red/blue interface around age 24 - it’s the right spot, but I don’t think it’s a significant feature). But what has appeared is a clear dip around the late-30s, early-40s. Short of doing proper stats, it looks significant, and is much larger than I would have expected. There may be other effects in play, which I’ll discuss below, but perhaps we’re seeing at least a partial effect due to real divorces? Especially if you remember that there’s still a base line increase due to new marriages.
Let’s look at the men quickly before we move on to further discussion:
Figure 5
Again we have roughly the same peaks, and relationships, engagements and marriage are in the right order. Although less pronounced, I think you can see a distinct drop off in marriages (or, at least, of FB members) - worst case it’s roughly flat from age 37-45, which translates to a net divorce rate. (There’s also that tantalising hint of a feature around age 24…nah, surely not…)
It’s also interesting to compare the two:
Figure 6
We see that women are about three years behind men in both total relationships and marriage, so men are probably marrying women around 3 years younger than them (either that, or there’s a few guys who are serious cradle snatcher sand are throwing off the stats!) Oddly, the number of women dating looks larger on these plots - could it be an illusion, caused by scaling things percentage wise? Nope - of those who list their relationships status, 68% of all women are in a relationship, compared only 54% of men. While some of these are going to be same-sex partnerships or marriages, it should affect both about the same (unless I’ve unearthed an incredible statistic and lesbians are far more common than gays!) The answer may lie in those who didn’t list their relationship, as I’ll talk about below.
Oh, and just quickly - Facebook lumps all data for over 65s into the one category (oh, the discrimination!) That means numbers are higher and the data is better, and we see a dramatic drop in marriages and a rise in relationships. If it’s real, then the interpretation of the former is a little morbid. The latter, however, could be sweet - even lifelong bachelors are finding love, if not marriage!
What are some problems with this data? First of all, it’s not a truly random sample: it’s people on Facebook. On the other hand, “everyone’s” on FB these days, so it’s becoming increasingly good. Still, perhaps the people who are joining, particularly older people, are of a particular demographic. Are there alternate interpretations of the data in this light?
For instance, let’s try explaining the marriage dip at age 40: what if more single than married people are joining around that age? Perhaps those who are married and are that age have families that take up their time; they’ll only join when their kids have left home, around age 50-60. Or perhaps singles are lonelier and so are more likely to sign up. I could argue for the opposite too: what if people with kids are actually more likely to join, through kid pressure? Hard to say, but I have to feel that both effects are relatively small, and the drop from 85% in relationships to 75% could be enough to warrant a divorce style explanation. I’m investigating this further…
Another problem is that not everyone lists their Facebook relationship status. In fact, only about 40% of men and 30% of women who do (I think we can all guess the reason for the latter). Are people more likely to list one type of status over another? If you’re single, you might not want everyone to know. Or maybe you do, hoping to attract attention. Equally, most people in a relationship want to shout it to the world (disgusting, isn’t it?) - but after changing your status back to single for the first time, many people decide to list nothing. And then there’s those who simply have privacy concerns, and don’t make it available. How can we tell? If a higher portion of single/non-single people are hiding it, you’d expect there to be some correlation between those not listing and the relevant status. So let’s see the graph for men (the female version is just scaled):
It’s almost flat, with just a slight increase in privacy levels as people get older, which is probably to be expected. So I can’t for certain say that there’s not a massive number of married people aged between 40-50 hiding in there, but it seems unlikely.
And of course there’s dozens of other possibilities. Some people, particularly girls, list themselves as being married to their best friend. (Dollars to donuts we can actually see that peak around age 13-17 for girls in the graphs above). There might be other reasons why people of a given age and relationship status don’t list it on FB that could skew the results, but hopefully the broad strokes are here. Also, some people don’t make their birth year public - but Facebook still knows it and might include it in the data; I’m not sure.
So, conclusion: we can use Facebook (is there nothing it can’t do?) to investigate relationships through the ages (ha!). The graph looks roughly like you’d expect (or I’d expect; take your pick), with about 80% of people ultimately reporting themselves as being in relationships. Age 40 really does seem to be a bad time for marriages, but apparently at least some of them recover (either that or those 10% give up and never find true love again!) And women are going for the older man, as pop culture would suggest.
I’m currently repeating for the USA with its larger population to see whether the stats look similar, and I’m gathering some Census data on marriage rates to compare all this too. Hopefully over the weekend I’ll post that! Oh, and of course these plots don”t mean that in 20 years time we’ll have the same demographics - I suspect that by the time I’m 40, a lot less people will be marrying. The neat question, however, will be whether that helps or hinders the total relationship percentage! May this post survive until that time for comparison…
I haven’t done thorough stats on this or anything like that, so if anyone wants the data I’ve gathered, drop me a line. Any feedback or suggestions are always welcome!
