This is the perfect age to get married

And the magic number is...

People should get married between the ages of 28 and 32 if they don’t want to get divorced, at least in the first five years, research suggests.

A study conducted by Nick Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah, and published by Institute of Family Studies suggests that people who get married between 28 and 32 split up least in the ensuing years.



Wolfinger analysed data from 2006 to 2010 and the 2011 to 2013 National Survey of Family Growth. “The odds of divorce decline as you age from your teenage years through your late 20s and early 30s. Thereafter, the chances of divorce go up again as you move into your late 30s and early 40s,” he wrote.

For each year after about 32, the chance of divorce goes up about 5%, according to the study. Wolfinger says the curve persists “even after controlling for respondents’ sex, race, family structure of origin, age at the time of the survey, education, religious tradition, religious attendance, and sexual history, as well as the size of the metropolitan area that they live in.”



He thinks the reason might be selection bias. “The kinds of people who wait till their 30s to get married may be the kinds of people who aren’t predisposed toward doing well in their marriages,” he writes. This also means “people who marry later face a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony.”

However, other sociologists are not too inclined to agree. The University of Maryland’s Phillip Cohen used a different set of data, from the American Community Survey, to say that getting older didn’t mean your marriage had less chance of survival. According to his analysis, the perfect age to get married if you don’t want to get divorced is 45 to 49, which, he notes, is why people shouldn’t make life decisions based on statistical analyses on the Internet.

This article originally appeared on TIME.