The romantic origins of Valentine’s Day goes back to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales when he related that the birds of England mated on the February feast of St. Valentinus to produce their eggs for the spring. This association is the beginning of our notion that Valentine’s Day is associated with love. The first recorded Valentine was from the French Duke of Orleans, who wrote his wife from prison that he “was already sick of love” (by which he meant “lovesick”) for his wife. He called her his “…very gentle Valentine…”
I saw her in the grocery store in the summer of 1987. She was sporting an 80’s hairdo along with a red t-shirt and gray shots that showed her legs to great advantage (she still has both the shirt and the shorts, she still fits in them both and she still looks fantastic in them). She had her back to me as I was over one line, staring, taking in her delicious gorgeousness. She was oblivious to me, but she took my breath away.
The clerk knew her and asked her what she had been doing lately. She replied that she had been in college for six years and was almost ready to graduate. I thought, what a beautiful chassis but not much under the hood – six years! We paid for our purchases in our respective lines and went our separate ways without ever making eye contact, speaking or acknowledging each other.
According to the US Census Bureau, your chance of getting married before the age of 40 is 86% for women and 81% for men. In 1962, 50% of 21-year-olds and 90% of 30-year-olds were married. Today, it is 8% for those who are 21 and 51% for those who are 30. Mathematicians calculated for Science Tech, as reported by the British paper The Daily Mail, that your odds of finding “The One” on any given day are 1 in 562. You can increase those odds by 17% with online dating, 16% by going out after work and mingling in a public space and by 15% by going to the gym. The mathematicians found that being set up by family or friends worked only 1% of the time.
Of course, things are different now for those courting than for earlier generations in so many different ways. Bridebook commissioned a scientific study and found that 89% of today’s generation of married couples lived together prior to tying the knot. The average length of relationships before modern matrimony is about 5 years. During that time couples dated each other exclusively for a year and a half, followed by living together for two years and then another two years of living together as a formally engaged couple before walking down the aisle.
HER magazine commissioned a relationship study that chronicled today’s newly marrieds’ dating journey toward Holy matrimony. The average woman had seven relationships prior to marriage while men had eight; both sexes had four “disaster dates” each, women went on two blind dates and the men three. The women reported having seven sexual partners prior to their eventual husband and hubbies confessed to ten. The average woman kissed 15 frogs before finding her prince and the men kissed 16 before landing their queen. Each sex admitted to falling in love twice before finding their forever mate and those two previous breakups made them question whether love was worth the pain or not.
The Cornell Marriage Project interviewed 700 people married only once and for a lifetime to see what makes for a long, satisfying marriage. The couples have a combined 40,000 years of matrimonial experience between them. The key, according to those long-married people, is “Don’t settle for just anyone because you’re afraid you’ll end up unmarried and alone.” They say cultivate good communication skills, prioritize your partner’s needs even before your children’s, don’t forget you’re not just Mom and Dad but you are first and foremost a man and a woman. In addition, they advise don’t fight when you’re hungry, be willing to change, take care of yourself and treat marriage like a long-term commitment.
Returning to the grocery store encounter in the late summer of 1987, imagine my surprise when the attractive coed I saw in Randall’s grocery store showed up right across the hall as Jerry Opbroek’s student teacher on the Monday after I saw her at the store. To my students I made a remark to my class in jest, something like “Has anyone seen the babe student teacher across the hall?” A shy girl named Cheryl raised her hand and said, “That’s my sister. You should go out with her!”
After a little protest and some hemming and hawing, I did ask out the babe student teacher. It turns out the six years at university included a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, a teaching certificate and a stint doing research at the federal fish hatchery in Yankton before embarking on student teaching at Mitchell High School.
We met, formally, in October of 1987. We got engaged on December 15, 1987 and married on July 30, 1988. The nearly thirty-six years I’ve known Julie have been the happiest years of my life. She is a nationally recognized science educator and still takes my breath away.
Happy Valentine’s Day to you and your special someone.