|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In December 2008, someone emailed Snopes, asking whether a text they had purportedly received about a marriage statistic was accurate. The message to us read: I got a text forward saying that 90% of people marry their 7-12 grade sweetheart. Is this true? How did you guys meet? is a question commonly posed to couples, and the answers may range from a mundane Oh, we met at work or We were introduced by a mutual friend to a comical or bizarre, one-in-a-million chain of coincidences that brought two strangers together. Yet for all the variegated responses this question might possibly elicit, the statistic quoted above suggests that by far the most common response is an ordinary and simple one: the overwhelming majority of married couples (90%) originally met and established an initial romantic relationship during their secondary school (i.e., junior high or high school) years. But is this statistic accurate? It might have been true (or closer to true) in an earlier era, when people tended to marry younger, when a larger percentage of the population lived in rural areas and/or spent most of their lives close to their birthplaces, and when the opportunities for meeting and mingling with members of the opposite sex after the completion of high school were limited by more restrictive social mores and a more rigid separation of the sexes in the areas of employment and post-secondary education. However, we could find no evidence documenting that the cited 90% figure is (or was) true any time in the last few decades, at least for the United States. Statistics about how married couples met vary from year to year (and survey to survey), but studies in recent years have consistently reported that more couples met through family or friends, at college, at work, or online than in secondary school. For example: Another Harris Interactive survey conducted in January 2006 asked respondents who were currently involved in relationships (although not necessarily married), How did you meet your current partner? and compiled the following results. Note that the School category, even though it encompassed both secondary school and college, was the answer given by only 14% of the total respondent base: Even allowing for some potential biases in survey methods (e.g., online surveys might target a greater preponderance of people who met online than other survey methods would), it seems clear from these and similar studies conducted since the early 1990s that nowhere close to 90% of U.S. marriages are matches between people who were secondary school sweethearts. One of our favorite how they met stories (true or not) is the following, told of former MLB player Cal Ripken Jr.: In 1984, the athlete was approached for his autograph by a middle-aged woman who said, 'Please sign it to my daughter Kelly, because my other daughter’s spoken for.' He signed it, 'To Kelly — if you look anything like your mother, sorry I missed you.' About two months later, a young woman approached him and said, 'Thanks for being so nice to my mom. The baseball player replied, 'Oh, are you Kelly?' She was, and now she’s Mrs. Ripken.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}