What do think is the average age to get married and kids?

[SouthMan28]

As I'm 30 and feel behind in life and me and my partner feel like everyone is getting married and having children!

When do you think is the average age?

It varies a lot depending on where you live. I had my first DC age 31 and I was the youngest in my NCT class and earlier most of my friends, but I was living in London. I think London is later than other parts of the country (prob because it's so expensive there!).

Agree it depends where you live. I’m almost 33, live in London and only have two married friends - only one of those has kids and she’s 39. Other friends range from mid 20s to 40 and are childfree, some are single, others casually dating, some living with partners but not intending to marry. In my hometown it seems people got married in their 20s or early 30s to people they’d been dating since school. Different worlds.

It varies so much I think, depending on your friendship group etc. out of my closest friends, the first one to get married was 28 (had been with her partner since she was 16) and the last one to get married (so far) was 35 (had been with her partner for 2 years), and a couple of my best friends aren't married yet!

I’m 30 and one one of my friends has kids and she was an outlier at 24.

average seems to be married 27 - 32
kids 31 - 35

(I’m in Manchester with a professional circle)

all of this, exactly, applies to me. Most of my friends had their first when I was having my second (at 33-35). About half were married, the other half not interested in getting married.

You know there are actual statistics on this, right?

The average age of first-time marriage for women is 35.7 years as of 2018. The average age of first child is 28.9. This disguises massive regional variation; in general, in wealthier areas women both marry and have children later.

I got married at 25. Planning to have first baby 31/32

But those aren't terribly helpful statistics, are they? The variations between different groups are so big that they make it fairly meaningless.

Best you can do for a whole country perspective though. If OP cares to say her area, more local statistics exist, or she can go on the ONS site and look it up.

London here,

I'd say...

28-35 marriage
30-38 children

Back in my hometown it would be,

24-28 marriage
25-30 children

I'd say a lot of the small town places do things earlier and the cities do things later due to career, lifestyle, expenses etc.

I do get your point - but to be fair, she did say 'what do you think' rather than 'what is,' so presumably she's not really looking for a statistical picture, but rather a sense of individuals' perceptions of what the statistics might be.

Anyway. When DP had DD she was 35 which was absolutely bang-on average for where we lived; I was a bit younger and we were several years younger than the average age for a couple to have a first child. I don't know about marriage. Then we moved, and where DD went to nursery we were definitely amongst the older mums.

I was 25 when I got married and felt that was a perfectly grown-up age but woah, I feel like it was young now!

amongst my circle, marriage is 33-37 and kids 33-40