How Did You Meet?

"How did the two of you meet?"

This is a question I always like to pose to couples that I become acquainted with.

It is a question that these couples are eager to answer. I am also interested in hearing what was going through their minds individually at the time they first met.

Left unsaid most of the time is all that occurred to put those two people together at exactly that point in time. You can call it randomness but I have to think that it is God's hand at work many times.

Mrs. BeeLine and I have been married for 45 years. We met in college at the beginning of my senior year. I would probably have not have been at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio but for my father being transferred from New York City to Chicago the summer before my senior year.

I met my future wife weeks after she had transferred to Miami for her Sophomore year because her father had been transferred to Ohio from Indiana and she needed to go to a school with in-state tuition.

I was the Rush Chairman for a new "Little Sis" program that my fraternity was introducing. Since the future Mrs. BeeLine was new on campus she was looking for ways to meet people. She saw a flyer that I had developed advertising an open house we were having at our fraternity house and convinced a few other girls in her dorm to join her. Upon arriving she saw me directing the events of the day and came up to me and said, "I don't want to butter you or anything but that is a great outfit you are wearing."

This is what I was wearing that day. The scan of this ancient photograph did not pick up the colors of that great outfit. The jacket is a medium pink with red stripes. I have a red tie to go with pale pink linen slacks. Of course, I am wearing white shoes.

How could she resist a man of such consequence and consummate fashion sense?

By the way, you can't tell this is 1971 can you?

The rest is history.

Of course, Mrs. BeeLine has her own version of those events. That is why these stories are so interesting.

Why do I bring this up?

I came across an interesting chart that tracks how couples have met over time in The Economist.

The theme of the article is to point out that meeting a mate online has quickly become the default in America.

For most of human history, the choice of life partner was limited by class, location and parental diktat. In the 19th and 20th centuries those constraints were weakened, at least in the West. The bicycle increased young people’s choices immeasurably; so did city life. But freed from their villages, people faced new difficulties: how to work out who was interested, who was not and who might be, if only they knew you were.

In 1995, less than a year after Netscape launched the first widely used browser, a site called match.com was offering to help people answer those questions. As befits a technology developed in the San Francisco Bay area, online dating first took off among gay men and geeks. But it soon spread, proving particularly helpful for people needing a way back into the world of dating after the break-up of a long-term relationship. 

If you are gay, it seems that matches are almost all done online these days. I thought it interesting that 5% of gay couples were meeting in church in 1985.

For heterosexual couples, over 20% of couples met in primary or secondary school in 1940 and another 20% met through friends. About the same number were meeting in church as in bars/restaurants. Only 5% met in college in 1940 because not that many were attending.

Compare that to today where those meeting at church or primary/secondary school is practically zero. Meeting through friends is up to 30% (it was as high as 40% right before the internet) and bars/restaurants are now over 20%. Online dating is closing in on both of those.

Has this greater ability to find the perfect mate increased the odds of having a successful marriage? After all, 100 years ago your choices for a mate might have been limited to five eligible singles within five miles of your farm. Today you may have millions of choices. Nevertheless, it still doesn't make it any easier for a successful marriage based on the statistics. In fact, with that many potential choices it actually might make the decision on the right mate even more difficult.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that we often hear about the high divorce rate, the fact is that the percentages of marriages ending in divorce has actually been trending slighting lower in recent years Is it a coincidence that the drop started right about when the internet began to take hold?

Or does the fact that couples are marrying later in life when they have a better understanding of their needs in a mate have something to do with it?

The data in the chart below suggests that a first marriage between ages 25-35 carries with it lower risk for later divorce than other ages. Median ages for first marriages are right in the sweet spot on that risk curve today.

I explained above why earlier marriages may be riskier. What about the older marriages? Could it be that by the time you are 40-45 years of age you are just too set in your ways to to accommodate all that is necessary to make a marriage work?

Need I say that anyone who has been married for 45 days or, like me, 45 years, knows that the graph above depicts the roller coaster that marriage can be. There will be highs and lows. There will be challenges and annoyances. There is also the great joy and satisfaction of traveling a life path with a life partner who supports you and nourishes your soul.

I have been blessed that there was a day and time that my life path crossed with such a partner.

I hope you are similarly blessed.