When I got Married...

All I can say is that my life is pretty plain,
I like watching the puddles gather rain.
And all I can do is just pour some tea for two,
and speak my point of view.
But it's not sane, It's not sane.

~Blind Melon

First off, I am not married, so obviously this is not about when I got married. Today I am going to look a little bit at the statistics behind the claim that the average marriage age is rising. In doing this, I am going to fill in the blank "When I got married _______." In order to get this to a point where I felt it was factual and summarized my claims accurately I had to make this post a bit longer. This is not an attempt at a justification for my current status, but rather an examination of the perceptions of a situation.

I sometimes joke that the average marriage age is rising....and has been since the neolithic era.

Thurg at his wedding.

But that actually is not true. Let me explain.

Here is a link to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. This gives median marriage age data. Those of you who understand basic probability distributions will understand why the median age is perhaps more useful than the mean (The median helps us understand the distribution in terms of percentiles instead of averages, hence we know the value in the distribution below which half the population lies). I will reference the following graph several times (This is a smaller version of the graph found under the link. This way if you are on a phone you can possibly view the graph a bit more easily):

Are marriage rates declining? Yes. But how severely? Note that there was a major dip in the census data post WWII (1950, 1960, 1970s). People getting married in that era currently control a significant proportion of the public pulpit on marriage. Keep that in mind. 

According to the work of the well know (in the field) economics professor Nicholas F.R Crafts of the University of Warwick (link here), all but two of the 43 English counties had higher median marriage ages for women in 1861 than the median marriage age for women in the U.S. in 1910. Starting in 1890 (Which is as far back as my data goes), median marriage age for women in the U.S. trended overall downward for the next 60 years. It took until 1970 (That is in the 20th century) for the median marriage age of women in the U.S. to surpass the lowest recorded median age (by county) in England in 1861. What does this mean? It means that women in 1950, 1960 and 1970s were seemingly getting married at ages unprecedented for over a century. 

Remember that the 1860s were a time were it was not at all unusual to see a girl get married at ages that are not even legal without parental consent these days. Yet the median marriage age of women was higher in every county of England in 1861 than it was in the United States 100 years later. 

I am going to be sloppy and go out on a limb: We would also see a similar phenomenon with men. I am going to ignore the fact that married couples in the 19th century usually had a larger age difference than we are used to these days. If we factor that in, the results for men would be even more pronounced. Conclusion, the post WWII generation got married at ages so low we had not seen them for nearly 100 years prior. 

By the way, average life expectancy rose by 30 years over that same century time span. Rather curious, is it not? (Yes, married men live longer. But the effect is minimal at best. This rise in life expectancy cannot be attributed to getting married at a younger age. As noble as that is of course.) 

Let me raise my hand here and admit that in 1860, marriage ages for women in the U.S. were lower than in England. Professor J. David Hacker of the University of Minnesota estimates in this paper that it was roughly 2 to 3 years lower in the U.S. However, as the U.S. modernized to the level of England, marriage ages also quickly rose to those of England.* This is reflected in the U.S. Census data. As with many questions in social science, we have to pick between two less than ideal alternatives. We can either use statistics from a more modernized country and extrapolate to the U.S., or we can use 19th century statistics from a country based on rustic agrarianism. We can pair data sets from countries modern among their contemporaries, or we can pair data sets from the same country, albeit a country which saw a rather rapid modernization movement at the end of the 19th century. In all, this shows that attempts to use social statistics from bygone eras to create policy platforms for the modern era will always require leaving some hole unfilled.   

So, to fill in the blank, "traditional America" (Meaning those born in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s) can say "When I got married, I was more likely than not married at a younger age than someone 100 years older than me." Probabilistically, that is what the median marriage age tells us. Not until 1980 (120 years later) did the median marriage age in the U.S. surpass that of the 1860s in England. So in other words, my grandparents' generation got married younger than any other generation that has ever been alive at the same time they were.

Sit up and read this carefully, because even well respected sources such as twentysomethingmarriage.org** sometimes overlook this. Marriage did not start in 1950. In this article twentysomethingmarriage.org makes a sloppy (or sly) mistake by cutting off their graph at 1947. This allows them to "show" that marriage ages are on the rise, but lead the uninformed reader to assume that marriage ages have always been on the rise. But go back and look at the U.S. Census data. Surprise! Marriage was a thing before 1947. And the 1950 census had the lowest median marriage age on record, a record which started 60 years prior with a median marriage age that was 3 years higher. Again, just because you read it in the ultra conservative "Family" section of your ward newsletter/local paper does not make it true.

Now let me end by fully acknowledging that currently the average (and presumably the median) marriage age is as high as probably it has been for a very long time (Ignore some of those people in the Bible that got married at age 439 or whatever). The percentage of men in the U.S. never married at age 35 is about 1.8% higher than it was 100 years ago. Yes, fewer men are getting married. But the rates are not nearly as severe as some would have you believe.  

Furthermore, I just have not seen good evidence that it actually matters what age someone gets married at (within reason). Some people refute this by talking about their early struggles in marriage at age T minus 20 years old and how it really brought them closer together as a couple. Great! I agree that working through difficulty can be positive for your marriage. But how in the world does that mean I will have an unsuccessful marriage if I get married at a later age?*** Note that having to work at your marriage is a fact of life. That is true whether you are 20, 30, or 100.  I am not trying to belittle those of you who did get married young. But my story has never been your story.  And that is true even when I was a small child.

Sadly, just because it is true does not mean people will believe it. And the microphone does not shut off when someone misinformed gets up to speak. 

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*To quote from the paper: "Indirect evidence suggests that the age of first marriage in the United States began to rise sometime in the eighteenth century and continued to increase slowly in the nineteenth century, peaking around the turn of the twentieth century." Hence people who got married from the 1940s to 1960s in the U.S. were actually a low point in the rise and fall of marriage age. This paints a slightly different picture than many would have you believe. If you are feeling really gumptious, read the whole paper. It is very eye opening and is amazingly accurate in establishing that rising marriage age is systemic to a rapidly devolving society. (That is to say, the claim that a rising median marriage age is caused by unmarried people refusing to take extant marital opportunities is not well founded).

**Let me say though that this site is a must read if you want to speak in an educated way about marriage and singleism. If you seek to preach about singles of my demographic, this site is pretty much the canon. It does an excellent job of bringing in legitimate and respected sources from both sides of the debate. This "bipartisanship" results in one of the very few moderate commentaries on marriage. The writers actually get social science and do not resort to "back in my day" finger pointing, nor do they fancy themselves qualified to speak for "The Brethren." A well regarded member of the Church actually writes for these people by the way.


**There is some evidence that getting married in one's thirties can be correlated with lower marital quality. However, this same research makes explicit note of the fact that such claims differ "significantly" when blocking by those who "were religious and those who weren't." And as with many studies in social science, there always are two sides to the story. The article from twentysomethingmarriage.org that I cited ends by saying "In general, couples who wait till their midtwenties or later enjoy more maturity and financial security, both factors that make it easier to sustain a lifelong marriage." If you fall outside of this category of course you can still have a quality marriage. But the point is that even moderately conservative social scientists (i.e. people who do actual research instead of just polling their freshman marriage prep class) indicate that as long as you get married at a reasonable age, you can have a successful marriage.

My Grad School Options.

To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves.

~Bob Dylan.

In the past two weeks, I have been in four different states touring universities. As many of you know, I am going to be starting a PhD program in the fall. I have eliminated my choices down to three options. I am accepted to each of these programs, so now I just need to decide where to go. This will be a post on what I saw as I toured these different universities. Add your comments as to where you think I should end up. If you just want to read about the schools, skip the next few paragraphs.

First off, there are some straight up freaks out there in the world. I will not describe all the body parts I have seen pierced. Dennis Rodman is not the oddest person to ever set foot in Seattle. To each his or her own I guess. Neck tattoos are just an odd practice. And it is sad to see otherwise pretty young ladies smoking at age 23. (Tattoos and pierced noses are one thing, and indeed a culture, but how in the world can you grow up in the modern era and become a smoker?)

I also saw a few fringe people. "Outliers." "Freakonomics." These people were what you could call "odd," but ultimately were pretty nice I feel. They just were from a different era. The pictures below resemble actual footage I took.

 

Let me add that I of course come from one of the weirdest universities in the US. And I have met a lot of freaks right here where I go to school. Freakery can be very subtle. In fact, subtle freakery is perhaps more disturbing. It is by nature secretive. 

Right after casting judgment on the neck tattoo people of the world, let me also add that I had it reaffirmed to me that sometimes "we," the "peculiar people" like to think we have a corner on all things good: modesty, abstaining from drugs and alcohol, blah blah blah. Yes, I met a lot of people who live very differently than I do. Yes, I met beer chuggers. But I also met people who had the poise to carry themselves in a dignified way without needing to build fences around the law. I met a lot of non "card carriers" who were more modest than many of the face-painted people whose feet mince by me everyday. And Surprise! A man can have a beard and not be a drug addict. And a man can be clean shaven and chug beer like a lumberjack.

Now, we all know well these things I have said above. Nothing new to see. And these statements are not the point of this post. They are merely observations relevant to my travels looking at graduate schools. Ultimately I learned that I have freaks living in my own backyard (No, not the Sterns and their monkeys) and there are perfectly normal people living outside my state. Again, not a revelation, just an observation of known fact.

Here are the three schools I am considering as my final options. I list facts about each. Perhaps give feedback as to what you think, because as of right now I have no idea which one is the best. As far as I know, none of the readers of the blog go to any of these schools. I use code names for the schools to allow me to be more open about what I saw without publicly bad mouthing these places. Don't work too hard trying to match these code names with mascots. You will not succeed. In reviewing these places, I might make qualitative judgements without defining terms. What is "bad weather?" What are "a lot of drinkers?" So on and so forth. Yet I feel that leaving these terms in an ambiguous state actually allows us to get a better feel for what the school really is. 

The Claw.

• The weather here is okay. Not great winters, but survivable. It does rain a lot though. I was here for three days and it rained non stop for two of them.
• This is a beer and drugs school. I am not going to say "illegal drugs," since we do not always have the same laws everywhere. So let's just say "drugs." And beer. It seemed like every place we went, the lead professor was offering to share his booze. He also doubled as our van driver, so that was comforting.
• The cost of living here is very low. Especially compared to what I would make in terms of stipend. 
• This school is pretty isolated, but that could be a good thing. It means low pollution and access to nature.
• They have a professor named Bob Dylan. Okay, he spells it Dillon, but still.
• There is not a huge job market locally for my field, but within a 150 mile radius or so, there is a lot of opportunity. Maybe even a top 3 city for my profession.
• The amount of LDS people living in this area is pretty low, but they do have a singles branch for those of us still going to the "specialty units" (As opposed to the general "mutt of all trades" wards). 
• I also am pretty sure that about 2/3 of this school is Asian. Yet, alas, there are no specialty Church units for them. Not that it matters to me anyway, since I am not the right race. But neither is Jimmy--and it's his home state.

The Paw. 

• The weather here is amazing in the winter and survivable in the summer. This could clue you in as to where it is located. 
• This is a coffee school. I am sure people here drink beer, but no one offered to buy me any and the lead professor himself entirely abstained. The lead guy also had more head on his head and face than some grizzly bears have on their entire body. Yes, back hair can be combed up and over your bald spot.
• Everyone was wearing swimming suits when I arrived on campus. This seems to be common attire. Sort of strange for a place with so little water.
• This school has the strongest program and is situated in the best job market of the three schools.
• There are a decent amount of LDS people in this area. They have multiple singles wards. No word on other specialty wards.

The Thaw.

• The weather here is bad for pretty much the entire school year. And the air quality is awful. I hate to say it, but my vision of this city is that of a coal mining town from the 50s. This is not what the town is actually like, but that is how I picture it.
• This school has offered me the most money. It comes with a few technical caveats however, so I am not totally sold on this offer. Sometimes more pay also means more work. And $1800 more a year may not be enough to make up for other concerns.
• This is a.....beer school? Maybe? All I know is it is not a coffee school and it is not a drug school. So beer school it is. I actually have no idea what people do in this city.
• The local job market for my field is not necessarily very strong here. Especially if I do not want to research ballistics or bovines. But it is at least on the right side of the continent to find work in my field.
• There are a number of LDS people here I think. There also are a lot of anti-Mormons. And a lot of people that dislike my current school. Sometimes those sets are distinct. 

Conclusion.

There are of course a few factors that are impossible to predict. What if I go to The Thaw and the whole city is hit with a flu epidemic? What if I go to The Claw and it turns out that their entire program goes under water? What if I go to The Paw and get entangled in a professor's back hair and beard? (So that's why beards are so bad!) 

Then there is the whole issue of not being married. I have a few associates who found their spouse after moving cities. What if they had gone to a different city? We have no way of knowing what would have happened. We could argue that no matter where they had gone they would have gotten married. Yet obviously not everywhere had the magic touch else they would have received admission to the marriage club sooner. Who knows. As they say, "There are plenty of fish in the sea." This guy caught one.

Good fishing, right? Straight from the Bayou. Or the circus freak show. Also keep in mind that there is so much trash in the ocean it actually has its own Wikipedia article.

Comment below if you have thoughts.

Date and Preserve the Planet

Sit beside a mountain stream, see her waters rise.
Listen to the pretty sound of music as she flies.

Find me in my field of grass, Mother Nature's son.
Swaying daises sing a lazy song beneath the sun.

As is tradition, I am going to write about an upcoming holiday. This time it is St. Patrick's Day. For this special St. Patrick's Day edition of the blog, I will be talking about how you can have a great time going on your weekly quota reaching date and also preserve the planet. This is what we call "Dating Green." As I have a few associates that come from states that claim to desire to preserve the planet, I felt that this topic would be very fitting for the Day of Green.

1. Walk or bike everywhere for the date. If she objects to walking several miles to preserve the planet, remind her that the future children you will have together depend on a healthy planet.

2. Refuse to use anything made of plastic. This includes most of the known world. If the girl is wearing eyeglasses, chances are that her spectacles are made of plastic. Dispose of these immediately. It is better to be blind and live on a clean planet than be able to see in a pollution heavy world.

3. Avoid children at all costs. (This is something I do even when I am not trying to be green, which is most of the time). It is a well known fact that children are damaging to the planet. Used diapers, empty juice boxes, greenhouse gases, and nuclear waste are just some of the many things that children produce that are damaging to the planet. You might as well just be throwing uranium tailings into the ocean. On the topic of diapers, I am aware that a few of you have "gone cloth," which is a huge debate on mommy blogs. I am not a mommy blog writer, so I have no real opinion. Maybe Kelsey Gurley can give advice on "cloth."

4. Do not shower before going out on a date. This will save quite a bit of water and will give your skin a darker complexion. They invented Axe Body Spray for a reason. Unfortunately Axe only really works if you are dating a high schooler with a cold.

5. Consider a planet friendly wardrobe. I remember seeing a lady once that had crocheted a big purse out of used plastic bags. Why not extend this concept to your clothing? Here is a smock/coat made from old high density polyethylene bags. It is waterproof, it preserves the planet, and it will hold in your stench from not bathing.

6. Only eat at restaurants that buy locally. Too many precious resources are spent transporting your food from Siberia to your dinner plate. Eating at restaurants that buy locally also has the added benefit that they are in walking distance. Yeah......I'm not going to lie, you might start regretting that whole "no car" rule.

7. In keeping with the no plastics kick, do not drink any bottled water. Remember, streams, lakes, and irrigation ditches are the most natural sources of water. Next to nuclear exposed children, irrigation ditches are also the largest source of unplanned genetic mutation in the U.S. But that is the price we all must pay for going green.

8. When you do decide a bath is absolutely necessary, use organic shampoos and soaps only. I am actually aware of a guy who claimed to be making such products. No word on his dating habits, although he did set his room on fire.

9. Do not touch your date. When you touch a person, your heart rate increases, which also makes your breathing rate increase. This will use up a larger supply of oxygen and will also produce a larger amount of carbon dioxide. If you hold hands with this girl, get ready to plant a tree, because you have breathed up at least twice as much oxygen as you otherwise might have if you had remained untouching. Do you want to save the planet, or do you want to hold hands with that girl that probably is just phishing you for answers to the math test? You choose.

10. Instead of paying for your dates with money, consider bartering using recyclable goods. Newspaper, plastic bags, cardboard, and small children all make excellent bartering tools for those desiring a greener way to pay.

How to get Married. Risk versus Reward.

The title here is a bit misleading as it makes it sound like a serious post on the risks and rewards of getting married. I know about neither. So I will instead talk about the relation of risk and reward. It is the basic concept of investing in the stock market. The more you invest, the higher the risk, but the higher the reward could be. Or it is like going for it on 4th down.* You might not make it, but if you do, the reward can be high.

I know that many of you are married. She/He loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah......so I think it's only fair to apologize in advance for writing about something you already know volumes about. But I guess that one faithful and unmarried follower reads this stuff to his household, so I had to put in something for him.

Back in the day, when Pluto was still a planet, I had a roommate named TimTim. He was unmarried, which was good for me (since then he would not have been my roommate), but bad for him (since then he could have avoided being my roommate). At times, TimTim would lament the fact that he was not married. We would counsel him as he lay in bed. Now this was a sort of blind leading the blind type of counseling, but I remember one time where we discussed "equilibrium based, gamble state economics." This is a fancy and superfluous phrase for "high risk equals high reward."  But I believe the first phrase was the actual one used since TimTim was rather cerebral. It was decided that he should call Sister Black (Since she had black hair like Madeline in Granite Flats. Although this well predates GF) in our ward and ask her on a date. This was a massive gamble as her Facebook status was "it's complicated" and she was some sort of "dream girl" for many a lad. I actually do not even remember if TimTim called her, but I do remember having this conversation.

In later conversations on this topic, we also began to wonder what would happen if we went to the "big open space" on campus and held up a sign saying "I am a great guy, please marry me." This would be a very risky proposition. But heck, if that went down, nobody could deny you trumped all "How I met my spouse" stories. And all you had to do was buy a poster board and a Sharpie. High risk, high reward. This is pretty much what Tinder is. And supposedly it works for some people. (I have never used Tinder. Honest to goodness.)

With that as a preface (it comprising nearly half of the post), let me now speak on the impetus for this post. As I have become more "aged" (meaning all my roommates are now married and I have not had a roommate older than me for something like 2 years now), people have begun to give me more suggestions on how to get married.

Truth be told, it is sort of like a parabola (concave up). When I first got back from my mission, everyone had a suggestion of how to get married. Sometimes they knew a "perfect girl" for me. Then they gave up for five years, and now it has started again. People have now realized that my situation is dire and that all hope is lost. Or something. The suggestions I have received as of late have become stranger. And more based in "gamble state economics." Maybe this is indicative of what the situation has come to. It will take random cosmological events to win the game. Their little deterministic game has failed and all that can save me now is a bending of both space and time to nontesseral methodologies.  

One person informed me they knew of a dream girl for me. And when they say dream girl, they mean they actually had a dream that I should meet this unknown girl. But again, perhaps this is the quintessential aspect I am missing: I do not gamble enough. Instead of just calling a girl I already know and getting shot down (Thrice), I should text a girl I do not know (after finding out her phone number from H.U.G.  because his sister went to elementary school with this dream girl).  Of course I might shame several generations of my family if it failed, but on the flip side, if the whole "text random girl in other state" thing worked, I could finally get them to stop talking about me at every family gathering I am not at.

So, from now on, perhaps I am going to shoot for high risk, high reward types of pursuits. Just you wait, pretty soon here you will be getting an announcement about my marriage to a foreign girl that I met after storming the field during a football game. Sure, this is high risk, but maybe the person arresting me will be an Italian beauty with whom I have an instant connection. Wish me luck, because if this fails, Tinder would be my only option. And we don't want that.

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*How to do 4th down. If you have the ball and 25 yards to go, call a draw play. If they have the ball, allow them to gain 15 yards after five broken shoe tackles. This is the strategy I hear.