Age of marriage

Men tend to marry women younger than themselves, and the older they are, the greater the difference in age they seek, choosing a mate.
So, young men believe that the spouse must be the same age as them; 20-year-old men prefer to marry women only slightly younger than themselves, and 60-year-olds prefer to marry women, about 10 years younger. Women at any age prefer men only slightly older than themselves. For example, a survey of schoolchildren of 14-17 years old, conducted by N. V. Lyakhovich, revealed that 69% of girls prefer a spouse to be 3-5 years older than themselves.
Women marry at an earlier age than men. Thus, in the USSR in 1966, men married an average of 29.3 years, and women — at 27.2 years; in 1974, respectively, 25.1 and 23.4 years. According to V.I. Perevedentsev (1987), in 1981, up to 20 years of age, 5.8% of men and 31.6% of women married, and from 20 to 24 years old - 6.9% and 51.2%, respectively. Now the age of marriage of men and women has decreased even more, but the ratio between men and women has remained the same.
Listed data according to which in the 1980s. in the USSR about 800 thousand girls under the age of 20 were married annually. But only 100 thousand of them married their peers. Thus, in 7 cases out of 8, the youthful affair did not end with marriage: the girls married those who were older than their school friends.
Since men marry on average 2.5 years later than women, over these years a sufficiently large “deficit of suitors” is formed and if for 18-19-year-old girls to get married there are no problems, then for women 20-25 years old there is a certain lack of suitors. True, they compensate for her by marrying 25-29-year-old men. But the woman of 25-29 years to create her family becomes even more difficult. It is not by chance that among these women about one-fifth is not married, since their potential husbands have already been intercepted by younger women.