Cassandane and I met through a group called Drinking Liberally, which I guess has rebranded. (I find it funny to tell people, "We met in a bar," but I guess "through friends would be almost as accurate.) We stopped going regularly before we got married but are still in touch with some people from there.
I thought that the decline in "met in primary or secondary school" might be something to do with the growing number of people who go on to university, but in fact school sweethearts have been falling far faster than university sweethearts have been rising. In the pre-internet-dating age, the big increases were "met through or as coworkers" - coinciding with rising female participation in the workforce, I suppose - and "met in bar or restaurant".
(In restaurant? How on earth you pick up girl in restaurant? You go to her table, casually introduce self? She will mistake you for overly chatty waiter! Slide your chair slowly, imperceptibly closer, eventually you are sitting at same table, having achieved date through vegetably gradual advance? Order her fancy dessert, tell waiter say to her "this from nice gentleman on table 3"? What going on?)
Even without the advent of online dating, you'd expect "meeting through friends" to have declined. Friendship groups have become ever more multi-racial, but Americans still overwhelmingly prefer to date within their own race - so your friend group will contain a smaller percentage of eligible people.
The matches at Drinking Judiciously are far more eligible.
Marriages should be negotiated by Metternich-level imperial viziers and supervised by cartoon mice and birds the way God intended.
I'm toying slightly with hiring a matchmaker.
I believe Sir Kraab and M/tch also met at a Drinking Liberally event!
5: How do you locate a matchmaker? How do you evaluate their skills? I can imagine it being much more successful than a series of dreary first dates.
I kind of met through church, in that I have a Nigerian friend from my church's 20's and 30's group who was involv3d with rowing, and we were at his birthday party. Tim's Anglican, and his parents had been pushing him to join a church as a way to meet people. Having met me, he started going to church. It happened that it was the same tradition.
I left out that a Tim was also involved with community rowing until it got to be too expensive.
A friend of mine hired a matchmaker in SF. He spoke highly of it but I don't think it yielded matches.
I know of one successful couple that met in high school. He was a year younger. She went to Brown, then he went to Harvard. Then she got a Ph.D in Classics at Harvard, and he got a management consulting job. Then they moved to Texas for her job, and he went to UT for law school.
My sister married her high school sweetheart; after she completed her master's degree. They've been together for twenty years and married for twelve. She's the only one I know for whom "high school sweetheart" didn't mean "teen pregnancy", and I'd bet that fewer teen pregnancies/less social pressure to marry explains some of that category.
Clearly, the comments of eclectic web magazines are the only sensible place to meet people.
I wonder if the increased noise level in bars and restaurants over the last twenty years has decreased the chances people find partners there. Most places I've been for the last few decades have been way too loud to actually talk to anyone I didn't know already -- you could pick someone up with mime, but that's of limited utility for most people.
My new habit is to use the SoundPrint app - you take a 15 second sample of the noise level and get the decibel reading, it confirms your suspicion that it's too loud, and then it offers to send a complaint to the management of the venue. I love it. I've sent complaints at movie theaters and bars, and even at my gym. I doubt it does any good, but I'd like these venues to at least hear some complaints that not everyone enjoys the noise level.
The proposed project will test the LizardBreath Noise-Mime Hypothesis by quantitative and qualitative comparison of mating patterns among New Yorkers and Parisians.
I just noticed the graph is truncated in the OP. Oops. Let me fix that.
14.last is a very plausible assumption.
15: are bars much noisier now or are we all just less tolerant of noise? I remember them being pretty noisy 25 years ago - on a Friday night, when there were plenty of people in. Varied from pub to pub of course.
Now I'm living in Dalquharter, the pubs are wonderfully quiet, because there's almost never anyone in them.
19: At least in the US, bars and restaurants are both noisier by industry admission, including by acoustic design (hard surfaces, no wall hangings): the less you can talk, the more you drink, supposedly.
19: My friend who owns a bar and some restaurants and coffee shops, maintains that you have to keep the music turned up above what I find acceptable, in order to honor the gospel of Restaurant Owners. The gospel goes something like, "People get keyed up and a little more energetic, and they order more drinks." Whereas quiet background noise implies quiet moods and fewer sales.
I am sure it is somewhat true and somewhat bullshit.
Remember that time that jms found a comment on a YouTube SWV video that went roughly, "My 8th grade sweetheart and I banged it out to this song after the school dance twenty years ago, and oops, she got pregnant! 20 years and four kids later, I still love you so much, baby, and we still bang it out to this song!"
15 is right in all particulars. I've mentioned that baa set me up with my wife, right? And, on our first date, after dinner we popped into a bar or dessert shop (can't remember which) where I eventually said "Can we leave? I can't hear a word you're saying."
I don't think people are actually meeting in restaurants. They just call the category bars and restaurants so people who met in a bar but don't like the sound of that will still say yes.
I wonder why "met in bar or restaurant" picked up in the 2000s? (I note that the graph ends pre-covid.)
Though my society is a rapidly changing one, it is still sufficiently conservative that matchmaking is still very common, albeit rather déclassé.
24: I think the key is that she formed an impression of you before hearing what you said.
I can understand the more noise = more drinking argument in bars, in that time spent talking is time not drinking, but I don't see how it applies to restaurants where my intuition is that to the extent that drinking demand is elastic at all, as opposed to, eg one bottle of wine for the table, for a given table it will entirely be dependent on the amount of time spent at the restaurant. And an overly noisy restaurant is not conducive to getting people to linger.
Which may of course be the real reason, if they want to turn over tables quickly.
I wonder why "met in bar or restaurant" picked up in the 2000s?
The paper suggests that this includes a growing number of people who decided to answer the question as if it had meant "where did you first encounter each other face to face", in order to avoid revealing that they got to know their future spouse online and then arranged to meet face to face in a bar or restaurant.
And an overly noisy restaurant is not conducive to getting people to linger.
I thought that was the reason for the noise -- so that people will eat their food and leave, making room for more paying customers.
"Can we leave? I can't hear a word you're saying."
Slick line! A lot more subtle, than "Your place or mine?"
or "Would you like to see my etchings?"
the less you can talk, the more you drink, supposedly.
Maybe I'll drink more and maybe I won't, but the chances of me actually going to that bar is significantly diminished.
My high school girlfriend is married to another high school friend of ours. When we were dating, the other guy was dating her best friend. We all stayed friends and they got together about 3 years later, although they've known each other for years as he was also a friend of her older brother (which is how I met her, too). They've been together 30 (! fuck) years.
25: I met my wife in a bar that had the word "Cafe" in its name, and it amuses me to say that we met in a cafe.
I suppose I could plausibly say that we were introduced by a friend, since I was a friend of the bar owner who introduced us.
In my large family, of the meetings that I know about:
--brother and sister who met their spouses in high school. (They are both still married, but my sister is separated from her spouse)
--sister who met her second husband (looong ago) through a printed personal ad.
--brother who met spouse through her family.
--Sister who, growing up, lived about six blocks from her husband in the same suburban neighborhood, but never met him until they were both adults. I believe they met in the bar he owned.
--My first wife was a work colleague.
Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore, it's too noisy.
Generally, I think the culture has moved away from adults socializing with strangers in public at all (although I'm speaking about America here, god knows what happens anyplace else). I wonder what a poll asking "Have you had an extended social conversation with a stranger in the last month?" would look like if you had data going back a long time -- I bet it'd be a huge dropoff since the seventies or so.
And of course it's harder to date people if you don't have a context where it'd be normal to talk to them in an undirectedly friendly way.
I met my wife in a pub. I walked over to her cold and introduced myself as we'd made eye contact a few times over the course of an evening. I think that was the only time I ever did that, although I did once walk across a pub and start making out with someone* with whom I hadn't shared a single word which massively impressed/intimidated my nerdy co-workers that I was out drinking with. They couldn't talk to women, I (apparently) didn't even _have_ to talk to women. I then pied-piper'd the girl's entire friend group to a nightclub and my (false) reputation at work was sealed.
* we'd been making eye contact and smirking at each other and when I walked over to say hello, she sort of snaked her arm out onto the back of my neck and started kissing me.
re: 40
It wouldn't be that unusual for me to talk to a someone I don't really know when I'm in the pub, but it'll be someone I vaguely know by sight, as I tend to go to places local to where I live, so it's not totally random strangers.
I met my wife in Ohio, but neither of us were local.
We celebrated my parents' 60th wedding anniversary yesterday, they met through friends.
YouTube SWV video
Stevie Wray Vaughn?
I wonder why "met in bar or restaurant" picked up in the 2000s?
I noticed that too, and I wonder if it really means "bar/restaurant was the location for first IRL meeting of a classified/online dating person." Although the timing doesn't quite work for that unless you get into semi-elaborate just-so stories.
My wife and I are high school sweethearts, starting in 11th grade. Went to different universities. But it took us a decade to get married and another to have a kid, so. We are slow but tenacious.
AIMHMHB, I think there's at least a 50/50 chance that I would still be happily married to my HS sweetheart if she hadn't bailed halfway through college. Or, maybe more likely, if we'd gotten back together again after college. We're still in touch, and I think we're still about as compatible as we were then. The only part I don't know about is that she's still an observant Catholic and I'm extremely not. That's a big deal, of course, but I'm not sure it would've been a dealbreaker if everything else aligned.
Anyway, to the larger point, part of the reason I think it might well have worked is that we're roughly who we were then, we've changed in generally the same directions, and I think willingness to adjust/compromise would do the rest. That last part is hard, mostly because a lot of people (men) think they shouldn't have to, but also because IMO there's a lot of notions around True Love that implicitly say that you're perfect as you are, and that there's another perfect person for whom you'll never have to change, and vice versa.
Huh! No line for met through trades union/political activities. Kids these days!
I first met my wife at a Sproul Plaza demonstration.
My sister met her husband in high school, went their separate ways during high school and after, and reconnected almost 10 years later.
My parents met at work, when they were both high school teachers. I feel like that's one of the best examples possible of meeting your future spouse at work.
My best friend from childhood met his wife in college.
Can't think of the story for anyone else.
I had a roommate who met his wife in high school. She was his teacher.
My parents, only 1 year apart in age, grew up around the corner from one another in a very small town, and somehow only met in university.
Whenever I express amazement at this, they remind me that it was a Catholic small town, and so there were more than 100 kids on my mom's (short!) street. Why would she know kids who lived on other streets?
The upper East Side was subdivided into Jewish blocks (the smallest area), Irish blocks, and German blocks, with a couple of Independent Italian states thrown in for good measure...
If you were caught trying to sneak through a foreign block, the first thing the Irishers or Germans would ask was "Hey, kid! What Streeter?" I learned it saved time and trouble to tell the truth...
The worst thing you could do was run from Other Streeters. But if you didn't have anything to fork over for ransom you were just as dead. I learned never to leave my block without some kind of boodle in my pocket -- a dead tennis ball, an empty thread spool, a penny, anything. It didn't cost much to buy your freedom; the gesture was the important thing.
--Harpo Speaks
I want a line on that chart that shows the "Other" percentage, since those clearly aren't exhaustive options. (I could maybe squint and fudge and consider mine "in college", but it probably shouldn't count. I was a master's degree student the same place I had been for undergrad, and she worked in the same building and we met at department social events).
I always sort of fantasized about meeting a person who had a really similar-feeling background to mine and had a similar vibe to me. But I tended not to actually be attracted to people who came closest to that. Jammies' background feels very not-at-home to me. But he has mostly conceded the vibe-of-household to be that of my family rather than his.
I did have one ex whose family I adored, and I would have loved to keep that set of in-laws and just swap out the boyfriend.
37: Those of us in tech see a prepended bang symbol as a negation operator (and are also all too prone to !fuck years).
In 20th century, year fuck you.
58 is not unlike how my parents met: my dad was a grad student, my mom was a secretary in the department (for Herb Simon, who some of you may have heard of). As my dad always said, the secretaries had better coffee than the grad students, so he started hanging around her desk.
I would have loved to keep that set of in-laws and just swap out the boyfriend
Honest to god, the biggest barrier to 50 was her parents: her dad was an uptight hardass (an orphan raised by priests, or maybe monks), and her mom was an anxious, deeply dull woman. I don't love AB's parents or stepmother (also an anxious, dull woman), but the rest of her family are wonderful, and I can handle her folks well enough.
Can't think of the story for anyone else.
For just about all of our closest friends, it's some version of college/grad school. We're an exception to that, but I can't think of any others. I know there are some, but I don't know what their stories are instead. At least one of them is "Pittsburgh is a very small town if you're a lesbian, so eventually you'll meet all the others."
First wedding AB & I attended together was for a couple who met at a SLAC in Ohio. Their daughter just graduated HS and is headed there as well. I can't imagine.
50: IMO there's a lot of notions around True Love that implicitly say that you're perfect as you are, and that there's another perfect person for whom you'll never have to change, and vice versa.
Oh my God, this.
My parents were also a grad student/secretary meet-cute. It was an engineering department, and in the seventies the secretarial staff would actually type up the grad students' dissertations, so my mom got very adept at swapping in the custom typewriter balls with mathematical symbols.
I should add that this is not my experience now, but I think it's in the ether, and I have gotten the vibe elsewhere.
I should add that this is not my experience now, but I think it's in the ether, and I have gotten the vibe elsewhere.
so my mom got very adept at swapping in the custom typewriter balls with mathematical symbols.
The long-awaited truly novel sex act.
69 is the new origin story I'll be using for my conception, thank you.
Still married to my high school sweetheart and prom date, although we went to high schools ln different states. We met at a sleepaway Summer program for dweebs with high PSAT scores and low likelihood of dating within their own high schools.
||
Supreme Court slaps down independent state legislature theory. Only Gorsuch and Thomas supported it (Alito's dissent was on different grounds). Sigh of relief.
It seems the decision had other things to say about NC redistricting so I am braced to hear that there was some kind of ratfucking under the headline item.
|>
Love all the reminiscences. Marriage rate has dropped sharply ( 70 to 35% )since 1970, I think that proportion of people coupled in any way has also. So an overall deflation over time for the whole plot.
Property values, insurance and formal benefit regulation, these are pretty strong drivers of coupling I think. I got married so my ex could have insurance (we loved each other and had been considering it, that was the nudge). I know several visa driven marriages. I don't know whether this broadly speaking is getting more severe- is the cost of housing boosting cohabitation? Many desirable places are crazy expensive, maybe more than in decades past.
Otoh no idea whether people are better about articulating what they want and actively looking for something particular- I do now as a basically old person but didn't really when I was young. Age of partnering up would have an effect that way maybe.
Just for the record, I met my first wife at college, and my second wife at work in a library. This was the Main Library at the Ohio State University, not to be confused with The Library, a campus-area bar (see 44).
I liked that library. The ceilings in the stacks were a bit low though.
Property values, insurance and formal benefit regulation, these are pretty strong drivers of coupling I think
I've come to believe that there's an important feminist argument for single payer healthcare paid for as a percentage of earnings (like FICA taxes) which completely removes it from the employer situation. For too many people, the requirement to have one person in a full-time job means that men take a higher paying job that is full time. Really full-time should be 4 days a week (30-32 hours) with one full day off between M-F. (and not everybody gets Friday off).
Tim's old company kept domestic partner benefits, and I benefited from it, but a number of companies dropped them once we got marriage equality. But the whole idea that all of your private benefits should be tied to having a spouse and that public benefits (aka the old welfare for women with children) were tied to not having one is so patriarchal.
is the cost of housing boosting cohabitation?
There was an article suggesting that young people were cohabitating much younger. I don't know how much data there are to back it up. Basically, if you get a regular roommate, you need a 2-bedroom, but if you're sexually intimate with the person, you can get by with one bedroom or even a studio.
Or even a single bed, so long as one keeps things strictly professional.
The bed has to be big enough for your friend to jump on it while you and your partner lay perfectly still.
I probably know of more high school couples who married, but the one who comes to mind is the pair who were both on my newspaper and yearbook staffs (business manager and techie, iirc), continued dating while attending different in-state colleges, and are now married with two children who look like exact replicas. Another couple I know from my high school didn't start dating until after college (he was also on my journalism staffs; she was not), and have also reproduced in the form of children who could believably pass as clones of their younger selves. It's kind of creepy.
||
Heebie and any other Texans/people in affected areas: how are you holding up in the heatwave?
>
Strictly speaking I met my husband at a wedding, but only very briefly -- long enough for me to note his attractiveness but nothing more. I actually met him when he moved into my group house, which I guess was via mutual friends, which I guess was via work/university crowd, including the wedding acquaintance. I was traveling during the search for a new roommate and had missed out on his interview, so gave my remote approval based on the endorsements--- without connecting his name to the face from the wedding. I came back from my travels shortly after ending a 4 year non-relationship of utter stupidity on my part and was feeling very rejected and non-optimistic about dating. I walked back into the house and he was sweeping and making a very tasty complex salad he shared with me. I sourly told my Mom he was very cute but probably gay. She made fun of me about this for the rest of her life. So not a classic meet cute, but she thought it was cute.
Why is there a Heat Advisory in central Texas if it's just going up to 103? That sounds like summer to me.
I agree it's a little weird. What's strongly unusual is this all taking place in June, for this length of time.
So the argument that it's a safety issue has to be, "people acclimate by August, but they'll be caught offguard in June" and I can't imagine that's how safety guidelines are phrased.
It is excessively hot, though! Indoors or in water, if the sun has risen, basically.
Strictly speaking I met my husband at a wedding, but only very briefly
Obligatory Cabin Pressure:
DOUGLAS: Well, there's always weddings. I met all three of my wives at weddings. My third wife I met at my wedding, which was a little awkward.
89 reminds me a bit of one of my favorite SNL sketches, "Meet Your Second Wife!"
I know a couple who got together at a kids' disco when they were 14(!). They attended different schools and then different universities in different cities (although only an hour or so drive away). They do now work for the same small company, in entirely different roles, but that's because one of them was already working there and told the other about the vacancy. They're now in their mid-30s and seem to be doing fine.