MISS UNIVERSE

Half of what you know about tying the knot is wrong — and that's a good thing. We untangle marriage facts and fiction and reveal the strategies that keep men and women together, happily ever after

Andréa Mallard

Between celeb nuptials that last a nanosecond and reality shows featuring 20 women eager to humiliate themselves for one Flavor Flav, it's easy to think that the state of marriage is imploding faster than a Mentos in Diet Coke. But when you dig into the research, it turns out our culture isn't as commitment-phobic as it seems. "Marriage has changed more in the last 30 years than in the previous 3,000," says Stephanie Coontz, a professor at the Evergreen State College and author of Marriage, A History. And these changes are actually for the better. Whether you're tying the knot now or planning to someday, it's time to make sense of all this matrimonial madness so you're guaranteed to live happily ever after.

We're too busy to be brides.

25 MEDIAN AGE AT WHICH WOMEN GET MARRIED TODAY
21 MEDIAN AGE AT WHICH WOMEN DID 30 YEARS AGO

Around the time you were born, most women were walking down the aisle at the same age you drank your first legal beer and went through your Devil Wears Prada phase. Today, the median age of first marriage is more like 25; 27 if you've gone to college. Getting a law degree or an MBA? Plan to hit the big 3-0 before you get hitched. But we're not stretching out the single life because we're procrastinating or waiting for the perfect guy to come along. Even after college, we pack way more into our 20s than our mothers did (or had the opportunity to) -- getting an advanced degree, renting our first place, lining up thankless internships to pave the way to promising careers. "Young women are postponing marriage because they're busy," says Terri Orbuch, Ph.D., a marriage and family therapist in Detroit and the project director of the Early Years of Marriage study at the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center. "The past decade has been a whirlwind of personal growth for me," says recently married Heather Harding, 31, of Toronto. "All of which I needed to experience before getting married. I went to grad school, I lived abroad, I tried on a couple of careers. Tying the knot just wasn't on my priority list in my early 20s."

Good news: Research shows that taking the time to score some goals before you settle down makes long-term happiness more likely. And, according to statistics, marrying young (before your 25th b-day) bumps up your risk of divorce by 24 percent. Some experts -- and probably your mom -- claim that with a quarter of a decade under our belts, we know ourselves better and so can choose a wiser match.

We try before we buy.

62 PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN WHO LIVE WITH A BOYFRIEND BEFORE GETTING MARRIED
40 PERCENTAGE WHO SHACKED UP BEFORE SEALING THE DEAL 30 YEARS AGO

Nowadays you're a rebel if you don't swap keys before swapping rings. Mekayla Beaver, 27, of Somerville, Massachusetts, has been living with her boyfriend, Greg, for almost a year. "I expect to marry him someday," she says. "But neither of us was ready to take that step when we first moved in together." Within a few months, though, Beaver had relinquished any lingering doubts that he's the one. "It's just a matter of time before one of us proposes," she says. For most of us, living together is a dress rehearsal -- 55 percent of cohabiters get married within 5 years.

Moving in with a beau does have some baggage that's worth unpacking. Research from the 1980s and 1990s suggested that people who lived together before marriage faced a higher risk of divorce -- fodder for conservative groups to claim that those couples had a blasé attitude toward commitment that would lead straight to Splitsville and wreak havoc on the traditional notion of family. But newer, more sophisticated studies suggest otherwise. And because cohabitation has become so mainstream, some experts now consider it a natural extension of dating, rather than a diversion from marriage. While it doesn't protect us from divorce, it doesn't make it any more likely.

And what about that old worry that your guy will be "getting the milk for free," so he won't bother taking the next step? Forget about it. If anyone is going to put off marriage at this stage, it's probably you. "In long-term cohabitating couples, research shows that the woman is more likely to be dragging her feet to the altar -- not the man," says Dorian Solot, coauthor of Unmarried to Each Other and cofounder of the national Alternatives to Marriage Project. Hardly surprising, given that what being a wife has meant historically -- cooking, cleaning, raising kids -- isn't so appealing on its own anymore. "Women want to pursue their own goals," Solot says. "And they want to be sure that getting married is going to allow them to be who they want to be."