Is there a specific age by which you’re “supposed” to get married? There’s an app for finding out. In honor of Valentine’s Day, TIME's tech section created an app that determines exactly when you should get married based on Facebook feed data on when all your married friends tied the knot. The app measures the median age of your Facebook friends who both list themselves as “married,” “engaged,” “in a domestic partnership,” or “in a civil union” and who list their full date of birth, including the year. The idea is that this number will pinpoint whether you’ve passed the age at which most of your friends have gotten married.
Curiosity got the better of me, so in the name of science (or something), I clicked the “Next” button on the app and gave it access to my Facebook profile. (Don’t worry, it won’t post itself automatically to your wall or anything.) It took a moment to do its thing before…drum roll, please...
Tada! The median age of my married friends is 29 – which means that I have exactly 24 days to get married before I am allegedly past my sell-by date.
Yeah…not happening.
Don’t get me wrong — I’ve been in a happy, healthy relationship for nearly five years, so it’s not a matter of commitment-phobia. But there are a lot of reasons why we’re not in a rush to head to the altar; the way we see it, there will be plenty of time for that in the future.
Besides, there’s also this: The idea of planning a wedding absolutely terrifies me. I’ll admit that part of me likes the idea of having one — I mean, you get to wear a pretty dress and hang out with all your friends in celebration of the fact that you found someone awesome with whom to spend the rest of your life. But the whole thing seems like such a stressful event that I’m not totally sure I’d want to kick off a new phase of my life with one.
Then again, the app also informed me that only 16 out of my 374 friends are married (or listed as married, or married and have their full birth date listed) so I’m really in the majority here, per this methodology. It also seems that the median age of all of your friends will likely be right around your age, assuming that you've got a lot of childhood and college friends in the lot, which would mean that the median age of your married friends would also be right around your age, right? For one unmarried, 24-year-old Bustle staffer, the app said she should get married in 12 days. For one unmarried, 30-year-old Bustle staffer, it said she should get married in seven months and 13 days. Let’s take this whole “marriage age” thing with a grain of salt, shall we?
Image: Getty Images
