Marrying young went well for me, part 2

In case it’s interesting, how Jeff and I got together.

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I went to a women’s college, which was great in many ways but not for dating men. By my final year I was feeling kind of regretful about this aspect of it, and spent more time visiting nearby colleges for dance classes and such. (“It’s good to spread the glory around,” as my granny said about getting off-campus.)

I met Jeff at a contra dance at his college. He was organizing the dance and was too busy to actually interact, but I became Facebook friends with him and his roommate. I was 21 and he was 20. 

I signed up for more folk dance events, many of which were in other towns. Jeff organized trips to these events, and would drive a 15-passenger van collecting students from a couple of colleges. Van rides were a great time to talk in a group and get to know each other. Jeff had a girlfriend, so we weren’t going to date at that point.

Later, he broke up with his girlfriend. (Jeff notes: “Prompted by her having the view that you should only date for figuring out if you wanted to get married, and it had become clear to me that I didn’t. And I was underestimating the opportunity cost of being in a non-serious relationship I didn’t think was going anywhere.”)

We continued going to contra dances a lot. I hosted a party in my backyard, and we both turned up 45 minutes early in case the other one was there too, which meant we had a pretty in-depth getting-to-know-you talk. I started waking up earlier than my alarm in the mornings because I was so happy and excited.

The problem was that I was about to graduate, and I was signed up to go to Central Asia with the Peace Corps for 27 months. He still had another year of college. I initiated a couple of things that were essentially dates (“I’m going to go walk in the woods behind your college, want to come?”) but we hadn’t talked about if we were actually going to be a couple.

After a confusing conversation involving a diagram on his whiteboard, he said he’d been considering if he should graduate early and come with me to the Peace Corps. He said the only way you can sign up for a placement together is to be married, so maybe we would get married. I said something like “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

Then we decided to date despite the uncertainty.

I met his family, who seemed stable and nice. I remember working together on a garden project I volunteered us for, moving sacks of mulch. It felt good, working with him. I thought, “Is this a person I want to coordinate daycare pickups with? Yes, I think so.”

After a few months, I told the Peace Corps I wasn’t going because I didn’t really want to go to Central Asia, and I had met someone I didn’t want to leave. The guy on the phone sounded like he heard this a lot from 21-year-olds.

After graduating, I took an internship near Jeff’s college to be near him. When we’d been together for six months, I took him for a walk and told him I wanted to marry him. He said he’d need to think about it. (This was a good idea, I’m glad he said this even though it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at the time!)

Over the next three weeks, we talked about some of the stuff we should have talked about before I asked. We talked about whether to have kids (I wanted them, he didn’t have strong feelings). We probably didn’t talk enough about money given that I wanted to live on an extremely low budget. We talked about under what circumstances we’d get divorced: if either of us became abusive, or if either of us was really unhappy in the relationship and we’d tried for at least a year to address it (with stuff like couples therapy) but someone was still really unhappy. Meeting someone we liked better was not a good reason. 

Then he said yes. My parents were a bit spooked because they’d met him once and didn’t get much sense for what he was like. They felt better after seeing more of him, especially after he helped me pay off my student loan.

After he finished college, we worked at a summer camp together and then moved into his family’s house in Boston. 

His mother wanted us to do a clearness committee, which Quaker meetings do before signing off on a wedding. We didn’t especially want a meeting’s sign-off, but went through the process anyway. The purpose of a clearness committee is to discern if you’ve thought through important considerations before making a major life choice. We met with six older married people from the meeting, and over about three sessions they asked us about how we communicate with each other and how much we’d thought about important issues (children, money, sex). They were so interested in our approach to money that they spent a lot of time on that to the detriment of the other topics. In the end they said they were happy to see us get married, but it wouldn’t be under the auspices of the meeting because we were atheists. That was fine with us.

We got married when we were 23, about 2 years after getting together.

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Observations (n=1)

• I had a hope of meeting someone who was into Quakerism and contra dancing. This seems like a ludicrously specific expectation in retrospect. The first Quaker contra dancer I met in college was gay, unfortunately for me (hi, Mark!) The second one was Jeff. 
• Neither Quakerism nor contra dancing is important to me anymore (although Jeff still does a lot in the contra scene). I’m pretty surprised that I actually found someone with these interests and then it turned out we were also both into EA once that became a thing.

About not dating much

• We had both had one serious relationship before, both people we met in high school. We both did very little casual dating.
• At some point around age 30 I read some red-pill stuff and spent a while wondering if it’s true that women mostly want a more dominant partner and if I had lost something by not shopping around more. Then I stopped worrying about it.

About meeting in college

• I would never have thought of the purpose of college as meeting a partner. (And a women’s college was not the best place for a straight woman to go looking for a partner.) But this was probably the most important thing that came out of my time in college.
• Jeff’s friend group in college had a lot of people who married their partners from that time — of the four who lived in his housing group his final year, three of them married people they met at college.
• In general the rate of alumni marrying other alumni at his college is something like 13%. This isn’t actually very high for colleges – the US colleges with highest rates of alumni-alumni marriage are conservative religious ones, with rates around 55%.
• When I think about what my kids should look for in a college, this does make me think “look for somewhere that has a lot of people who are weird in the ways you are weird.” 

……

In college, a classmate mentioned that she wouldn’t date a non-Jewish man because she wanted to marry within her religion, so why waste time? At the time this seemed weird and intolerant to me, but now I think it makes a lot of sense. I didn’t date while studying abroad partly because I didn’t want a marriage where one of us would have to emigrate. I do think it’s sensible to make dating decisions with long-term goals in mind.