They’ve been married for forty-eight years.
When Victoria first told me her story, it had aspects I expected to be common among the group—she married very young, her parents met her boyfriend almost immediately, and they shifted into marriage fairly quickly.
I figured that the part about marrying someone who lived in her same building was kind of random.
But then the next woman we spoke with, Sandra, seventy-eight, said she got married to a guy who lived just across the street.
Stevie, sixty-nine, married a woman who lived down the hall.
Jose, seventy-five, married a woman who lived one street over.
Alfredo married someone from across the street (probably the daughter of the neighborhood doughnut shop owner).
It was remarkable. In total, fourteen of the thirty-six seniors I spoke with had ended up marrying someone who lived within walking distance of their childhood home. People were marrying neighbors who lived on the same street, in the same neighborhood, and even in the same building. It seemed a bit bizarre.
“Guys,” I said. “You’re in New York City. Did you ever think, Oh, maybe there’s some people outside of my building? Why limit yourself so much? Why not expand your horizons?”
They just shrugged and said that it wasn’t what was done.
After our interviews we examined whether this spoke to a larger trend. In 1932 a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania named James Bossard looked through five thousand consecutive marriage licenses on file for people who lived in the city of Philadelphia. Whoa: One-third of the couples who got married had lived within a five-block radius of each other before they got married. One out of six had lived within the same block. Most amazingly, one of every eight married couples had lived in the same building before they got married.1
Maybe this trend of marrying locally held in big cities but not elsewhere? Well, a lot of sociologists in the 1930s and 1940s were wondering that same thing, and they reported their findings in the leading social science journals of the time. Yep, their findings were remarkably similar to Bossard’s in Philadelphia, with a few variations.
For instance, people in smaller towns also married neighbors when they were available. But when they weren’t, because the pool was too small, people expanded their horizons—but only as far as was necessary. As the Yale sociologist John Ellsworth Jr. said after a study of marriage patterns in Simsbury, Connecticut (population 3,941): “People will go as far as they have to to find a mate, but no farther.”2
Things are obviously very different today. I found out sociologists don’t even do these sorts of studies on the geography of marriage at the city level anymore. Personally, I can’t think of even one friend who married someone from their neighborhood, and hardly anyone who married a person from their home city. For the most part my friends married people they’d met during their postcollege years, when they were exposed to folks from all over the country and in some cases all over the world.
Think about where you grew up as a kid, your apartment building or your neighborhood. Could you imagine being married to one of those clowns?
EMERGING ADULTHOOD:
WHEN GROWN-UPS GROW UP
One reason it’s so hard to imagine marrying the people we grew up with is that these days we marry much later than people in previous generations.
For the generation of people I interviewed in the New York City retirement community, the average age of marriage was around twenty for women and twenty-three for men.
Today the average age of first marriage is about twenty-seven for women and twenty-nine for men, and it’s around thirty for both men and women in big cities like New York and Philadelphia.
Why has this age of first marriage increased so dramatically in the past few decades? For the young people who got married in the 1950s, getting married was the first step in adulthood. After high school or college, you got married and you left the house. For today’s folks, marriage is usually one of the later stages in adulthood. Now most young people spend their twenties and thirties in another stage of life, where they go to university, start a career, and experience being an adult outside of their parents’ home before marriage.
This period isn’t all about finding a mate and getting married. You have other priorities as well: getting educated, trying out different jobs, having a few relationships, and, with luck, becoming a more fully developed person. Sociologists even have a name for this new stage of life: emerging adulthood.