26 is the ideal age to get married

If you decide to get married earlier, you may miss out on the best ones, but after that, good candidates start to become scarce.

If you are looking for love between the ages of 18-40, then 26 is the ideal time to stop and get married.

According to Business Insider, this is called the 37% rule.Journalist Brian Christian and cognitive expert Tom Griffiths, co-authors of the bookAlgorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human DecisionsComputer Science with Human Decisions), says that rule could save you time searching for a mate.

The 37% Rule says that when you need to sift through a set of options in a limited amount of time—whether it's hiring a new employee, buying a new apartment, or looking for a romantic partner—the best time to make a decision is when you've considered 37% of those options. By then, you've gathered enough information to make a decision.You don't have to spend a lot of time choosing anymore. At 37%, you've maximized your chances of choosing the best in the bunch.

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Since the 1960s, mathematicians have developed this theory using an experiment known as the "Secretary Selection Problem".Hypothetically, you can only hire a secretary once. If you reject a candidate, you can't go back and hire them again (because they may have accepted another job). The question is: How do you find the best person?

If you interview three people, make your decision based on the second candidate's abilities. If she is better than the first, you can hire her. If not, you wait and decide. If you have five applicants, wait until the third one to start making your decision.

So if you’re looking for love between the ages of 18 and 40, the optimal age to consider marriage is just after your 26th birthday (37% of your 22-year life span). If you decide before then, you might miss out on the best people, but after that, good candidates start to become scarce, reducing your chances of finding the right person.

In mathematics, finding a good mate is like choosing the optimal stopping point. Christian and Griffiths explain that if you have 1,000 options, you should stop when you have gone through 36.81%.Research on successful marriages seems to support a marriage cutoff of age 26.

Last July, University of Utah sociologist Nichols H. Wolfinger found that people who marry between the ages of 28 and 32 are least likely to divorce. 28 is already 37 percent, but in reality, most people usually decide on marriage some time before the actual wedding.

If you’re thinking about getting married at 26, you’re on the right track. Of course, the 37% rule isn’t perfect. It assumes that what you want in a partner is the same, even though what you want at 18 is very different from what you want at 40.However, the 37% rule can confirm that 26 is the age when our love decisions are most reliable. This is the time when you should think about stopping looking for a new partner and preparing to make an important turning point in your life.

According to VNE