Posted on 09/03/2026 8:40:22 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you’re looking to get married, the place to go might be the Provo area in Utah. Or maybe Fort Wayne and the southern suburbs in Indiana.
Both locations feature some of the highest rates of new marriages over the past year in the country, according to a new project by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) called the Marriage Map. In the Provo area, fully 13.2 percent of never-married adults aged 22 to 39 got married last year. In the Fort Wayne area, the number was 10.6 percent.
The Marriage Map is a newly released, interactive online map created by IFS and hosted on their GoGetMarried website . It’s part of the organization’s ongoing mission to study and promote marriage and family life in the United States.
“Our research at IFS shows that marriage provides a tremendous number of benefits,” IFS research fellow and co-creator of the Marriage Map Ken Burchfiel told The Epoch Times. “However, depending on where you live, young-adult weddings may be either perfectly normal or quite rare. Therefore, we put together a set of maps to help men and women in their 20s and 30s figure out where their peers are managing to find spouses.”
To create the map, IFS took the most important variables people usually consider when looking for a spouse and created maps showing where mostly young adults aged 22 to 30 are actually getting hitched.
“If you’re trying to figure out where to move after school, wondering why dating in your city feels way too hard, or just curious what the numbers look like where you live regardless of your age or status, the marriage map has the answers,” the GoGetMarried website states.
The map offers a number of layers that users can manipulate by changing the settings. The first variable is the metric, which includes options for percentages of singles, percentage of people married in the past year, education and employment percentages, various ratios of men to women, and religious adherents as a percentage of the population, among other options. Users can also filter by sex and age. Results populate on the map through easy-to-understand color coding.
The map provides a number of insights into the dating and marriage landscape (no pun intended).
First, the best locations for marriage likelihood vary by age group.
Areas boasting the highest marriage rates for adults aged 22 to 29 are located in interior states such as Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Kentucky and not in coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles, where more people tend to be single and few marriages in that age range tend to occur. On the other hand, for adults in their 30s, urban areas tend to have some of the highest marriage rates. There’s one outlier, however: The Fort Wayne/Southern Suburbs area ranks pretty high in marriage rates for both the 22-to-29 age group and the 30-to-39 age group.
The IFS’s brief accompanying the map summarizes: “These findings demonstrate that, for young adults, the ‘best place’ to get married may depend largely on when they hope to marry. Those who are committed to marrying in their 20s may want to think carefully about moving to a major coastal city; meanwhile, those same cities could be an excellent option—though not the only choice—for marriage-minded adults in their thirties.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a high ratio of full-time employed single men to single women constitutes a strong predictor of marriage rates for young women. Similarly, the ratio of higher-earning men to single women correlates with higher marriage rates among women in their 30s, but it does not do so for women in the 22-to-29 age group.
More surprisingly, a positive correlation exists between marriage rates for young adult women and the percentage of women in that age group who are already married. In this instance, rather than seeking out areas with lots of singles, women would do well to find areas with fewer singles. Perhaps this is because those areas already have a culture of marriage that single women wanting to wed can tap into.
Higher levels of education and income among men correlate with more marriages for men—but only for men in their 30s. For men in their 20s, education and income seem to be less crucial, although certainly higher education or income isn’t an obstacle to marriage for 20-something males. And marriage rates for men who have a bachelor’s degree are higher in both age groups.
Summarizing the heart of the findings, Burchfiel said, “When reviewing the data, I was struck by the relatively high marriage rates between Northwest Alabama and Fort Wayne, Indiana.”
This area includes the southern suburbs of Nashville; Evansville and Southwest Indiana; Bowling Green, Kentucky; and Bloomington, Indiana.
“The high marriage rates here may be surprising to some, since this part of the country isn’t the richest or highest-educated,” Burchfiel said. “However, many parts of this ‘Marriage Belt’ do have solid ratios of single, full-time employed men to single women—a metric that correlates strongly with young-adult marriage rates.”
A somewhat unexpected finding is that areas with greater religious affiliation don’t necessarily have higher marriage rates. Although it’s true that religious people in their 20s and 30s are much more likely to be married than their nominal and secular peers, that doesn’t seem to translate clearly to geographical data. The map and accompanying analysis found essentially zero regional relationship between the percentage of the population with religious adherence and how many young adults got married last year. Some areas have high religious affiliation and high marriage rates, but in many places these statistics don’t match up.
Marriage rates aren’t the only factor in deciding where to live, of course, but they’re worth paying attention to for those looking to make a lifelong commitment and perhaps struggling to achieve that goal in their current locale. For various reasons, different parts of our country are more marriage-friendly than others and have built a stronger culture around marriage. When planning where to live, young adults interested in marriage should reflect on this, and IFS’s new Marriage Map provides them with a useful tool to do so.
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My county is in the deep purple. Doesn’t surprise me.
Story confuses "cause" and "effect."
Moving there might not improve one's chances - just as moving to Monaco (with Europe's highest percentage of millionaire residents) will not increase the likelihood of you striking it rich.
Regards,
you have to mormon in provo utah. not many non mormans in that neck of the woods.
LOL! Love it! I see Dane County, Wisconsin is shown as a ‘Danger Zone.’ I escaped 10 years ago. I was able to find a husband there, but he didn’t prove to be of lasting quality in the end. ;)
What country is that?
My country is the USA. My county is Hendricks.
Smoke On the Water was a great song.
Clever.
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