My "Perfect" Marriage Date

I saw a friend post about her "perfect" marriage date on Facebook and for the fun of it, I tried it.

Apparently, the app is a creation of Time Tech (yes, of Time Magazine). It uses the data on the age of your married friends and umarried ones alike and assuming, you're the kind of person who goes with the flow, predicts what date you should marry.

And my result was....

WHAT THE!

Five days ago I was in a van eating Junior Double Down behind a pregnant woman who seems to be giving birth any second, sitting next to a girl who uses flash for taking her selfie! (Well, correction, selfies, because she took a minimum of 15 photos. I couldn't count after that. Given the darkness of the van and the sudden flash of the flash, I was dizzy after 15 shots.)

Back to the topic, my initial reaction when I saw my result was "WHAT THE" with an F word and 10 exclamation points. But after the initial shock and urge to throw things, I realized, this result only means that half of my married friends, well, my Facebook friends are younger than age 24 and the other half older. If I look at it that way, wouldn't it make much more sense if the app used mean instead of median and used the age they got married and not their current age? I guess, the average age your friends tied the knot sounds better than half your married friends are younger than this age. I think I would stalk all my married friends and come up with my own analysis. I will post that soon.

Oh well, I guess after all the statistics have been laid out, the only variables that will have a significant relationship with your "perfect" marriage date and your "perfect" marriage age are your decision and your partner's decision. Nothing more. Nothing less. Well, you may argue to include the parental influence but I think that will be spurious because your decision will already be somehow correlated to your parents' influence or opinion (inversely or directly). Also, your decision should have a very strong, if not perfect, correlation with God's will for you. After all, God's time is never late nor early, it is always on time.

But we thank Time for the attempt to use Statistics in interesting applications. In this age of data and analysis, people are very receptive to the use of Statistics in their everyday life. Let us take advantage of this fellow statisticians and make known the power of Statistics!