RPW's advice is usually to capitalise on your SMV at its peak by marrying while in one's (early) twenties. The logic behind this is sound, but I was curious about how it worked in practice so I did some cursory research into divorce statistics. A quick glance at any list of "Countries with the Lowest Divorce Rate" show us that most of these countries are still strictly religious. The fact that strong religious ties correlate with divorce rate comes as no surprise, but as someone who considers themselves secular and lives in a secular country I wanted to know what affected divorce rates in secular countries.

Most western countries today are rather secular and have an unsurprisingly high divorce rate. I lamented to my friend who pointed out our own countries divorce rate. Ireland has a divorce to marriage ratio of 13-18%. (http://chartsbin.com/view/42185) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography)

This is compared to the average EU divorce rate of 44%. It seems like Ireland is the only secular western country with a divorce rate much lower than 50% (with other european nations having ones even higher). It seems easy to point out Ireland's religious past as the cause for this low rate but as an Irish resident I doubt that's the cause. Modern Ireland is very secular, having voted in gay marriage and abortion by popular vote, having become largely multicultural and even having a gay prime minister. One can easily point to other more religious european nations like Poland who still have a much higher divorce rate regardless of their stronger religious ties.

The one factor that struck out at me was the average age of marriage and childbirth.

In Ireland the average man and woman first marries at the age of 33.9 and 32.3 respectively.

In the US the average man and woman first marries at the age of 29.2 and 27.1

I'm not necessarily convinced that this is the cause of the lower divorce rate but I thought it was interesting to note. Which leads me to the point of this discussion. What do you RPW think about this? Are there other potential causes for this low divorce rate? Is marrying asap off your looks a RP tenet some of you disagree with?

tl;dr Ireland is a secular western country with a divorce rate much lower than the US, and first marriage age considerably higher than the US. Discuss.