Instead, they were expected to find a good husband. Up until the 1960s, most women were not expected to have a good job or a promising career. As opposed to the first half of the last century, they now have a decisive say in who becomes their husband and why. Simply put, women are much more emancipated today. The push for women’s equality was another big driver of the transformation of love and marriage. The logic is simple: the later you are pressured into marriage by society, the more people you get to meet, so, the higher the chances they live far away from your childhood house. So, unlike our grandparents, we don’t marry right after high school or college, but rather after experiencing adulthood for some time and living outside our parents’ homes for quite a few years. In big cities, it’s even higher than that! Nowadays, the average age of a first marriage is about 27 for women and 30 for men. Stats don’t lie: back in 1950, the average age of marriage was around 20 for women and 23 for men.

The main reason is, perhaps, the fact that nowadays we marry much later than people in previous generations. The world is much better connected and very few people limit themselves to their building or neighborhood when choosing a lifetime partner. Even more fascinatingly, one out of six had lived within the same block, and one out of eight had lived in the very same building! He discovered that one out of three married couples had lived within a five-block radius of each other before they got married. In 1932, a sociologist named James Bossard compared 5,000 consecutive marriage licenses on file for people who lived in the city of Philadelphia. “Finding someone today is probably more complicated and stressful than it was for previous generations, but you’re also more likely to end up with someone you are really excited about.” That’s the final conclusion of the joint investigation by American stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari and New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg shared in their debut collaboration “Modern Romance.” The investigation itself, however, is much more interesting.

Aziz ansari book review