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 among the strongest demographic predictors of marital dissolution, and marrying before one’s mid-twenties substantially increases the risk of divorce, according to an Institute for Family Studies analysis by Nicholas Wolfinger. That analysis describes a curvilinear pattern — prior to about age 32 each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by roughly 11 percent, with the late twenties emerging as the optimal window. 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 cannot be measured directly: 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 53% of never-married adults would like to marry eventually, and among those, 30% cite not having found someone with what they want in a spouse, 27% financial unreadiness, and 22% being too young or not ready to settle down. Those are reasons for remaining unmarried, not retrospective regret about waiting — so the 15% inaction figure shown here is an explicit proxy drawn from that barrier data, not a measured regret rate, and the comparison should be read accordingly. The same Clever Real Estate survey found that 30% of married respondents wish they had married someone more compatible — its single most cited regret — but that figure is not broken out by age at marriage, so it speaks to partner selection in general rather than to people who waited.
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.