Photographed by Winnie Au.Of course, your social situation, education level, and close, personal connections affect a lot of aspects of your life, from where you live to who you love. But, with a new app that culls info from your Facebook page, Time is saying that your friend group can reasonably predict when you'll get married.
Birds of an (engaged) feather flock together.
The app essentially picks up on your Facebook friends' relationship statuses, determines their ages, then uses this to predict the exact ideal age of your holy matrimony. From Time's note on their methodology: "For the purposes of this tool, 'married' refers to anyone who lists his or her relationship status as 'married,' 'engaged,' 'in a domestic partnership,' or 'in a civil union.'"
Based on the U.S. Census, the current median age for first marriage is 29 for men and 27 for women. So, it's easy to compare yourself to the country as a whole.
However, the methodology Time used to create the app should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. For example, it only compiles the current ages of your married/engaged/etc. friends, not the age at which they became official. And, of course, there's no way for the app to discern how many of your friends are jokingly "married" to a friend or how many of your wedded friends simply don't report their relationship status.
It's a pretty crude measurement — and one that, at best, only implies whether you're fitting into the average behavior of your Facebook world. But, it's kind of fun to see whether you're bucking the marriage trend in your FB group or not. As for me? I've got five months and 11 days until I become an old maid. Click through to test it for yourself. (TIME)
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