My parents were born the same year, which makes it easier:
24 when they met (they’d both just come back from WWII)
25 when they married
32 and 36 when they had kids (lots of miscarriages)
56 when they divorced (15 years too late, we all agreed)
IIRC they met shortly before the 1976 Olympics, when my dad would have been 29 and my mom, 26 - so they were a bit younger than that. They met on the number 80 Av. du Parc bus.
Mom was 13, Dad was 18. They were married two years later. I (the eldest) was born 2 1/2 years after that, one month after Mom turned 18.
This October will be 43 years for them. They’ve been through ups and downs, had six children–raised five, buried one–dealt with health issues and growing older…and are still very much in love!
Mom was 21 and Dad was 24. They married at 22 and 26.
Heh, don’t worry about it. Not the first time I’ve felt appallingly foreign. 
Anyway, yes, it was arranged. My mother’s parents died young so her older brother had to make the match, and honestly he couldn’t do as good a job as my grandparents would have. You know, he had his own family to take care of, and young kids. My mom was a nurse and very bright but she basically had to settle for someone of a lower* class and lower education. He had money, but since he had no education and thus very few job prospects his family was looking in the poorer families. So - a match made in heaven! Yeah, right. They’ve never liked each other much, more’s the pity. His parents met with my uncle and made all the arrangements and when he brought the *baraat *(wedding party) to her house was the first time they met. I think they’d seen pictures of each other, though. And who knows, maybe my mom peeked at him from the upstairs of the house or something when he came up.
*Castes…well, you’d have to ask **xash **how much castes really matter these days in India. I’m not entirely sure. But I know my mother’s family was never very happy that my mom, a *Brahmin *(scholar class) married a *Vaishya *(farmer class).
Oh, and I’m sorry. They got married when they were…31 and 33. So that was how old they were when they met.
Ha! My folks are from Philadelphia, and we had basically the same situation!
Grandmother [from her Rittenhouse Square apartment]: “You’re marrying the son of a garment worker? From Overbrook?” [swoons]
Heh, yup! More or less. My grandmother probably turned over in her grave.
My parents must have met when they were 20 or 21 - they got married when they were 23 and have celebrated 36 years of marriage this year.
My mother was 17-18 and my father was around 20.
The folks met in high school in the 1940s, though Mom didn’t like Dad so much at first. She liked him later and they married after he finished college.
16 and 18.
In Spain it’s customary to build nativity scenes for Christmas; in many places, parishes and other people leave their doors open throughout the day for people to go visit the display. Dad and a friend of his were taking a nephew of the friend’s to see the “Belenes”; Mom and her sis were doing the same with two neighbors. The two couples kept running into each other; when they were finished with the circuit, the boys decided to follow the girls because Dad’s friend had liked my aunt, but they mysteriously disappeared (their house was just next block to the last church in the circuit).
Dad was in his first year at accounting school, which shared the building with teacher’s school. The teachers’ classes were in the morning, the accountants went in the afternoon and they crossed at the gates. Dad recognized one of the girls from the “Belenes” - and quite a few years later, my birth graduated them into Mom and Dad
Urgh, I have to stop double posting…
Grandma-grandpa on Dad’s side:
She was one of the first female accountants in Spain and got a job working the till at some cousin’s music store in Pamplona (which still stands in the same place). One day two guys walked in to buy some records (stone!). That night she promised Our Lady that if she got to marry “the tall blonde guy” she’d name all her children Mary. Hence, José María, Francisco de Javier María, Jaime María Pedro Pablo, Ignacio de Loyola María and María Teresa.
That grandfather’s aunt-dad and parents:
Great-grand was engaged to a woman from a nearby town and broke the engagement when she said she “couldn’t wait to get married so she could fire the old hag” whose family had served ours since… uh… since we got servants or thereabouts.
Later he married another woman from the same town whom he’d meet in a party at the first woman’s house. They had 4 children. Several years after she died, he married her next sister (sister #3, who never married, lived with them) and they had 7 more. Only 7 of the children reached adult age; my grandpa was from the second batch.
Grandpa-grandma on Mom’s side:
He was a Don Juan, kept going through gf’s when he didn’t keep two at the same time (Barcelona was already a huge town, big enough for those games). She was a seamstress, very independent; many seamstresses had paying lovers and dreamed of “getting retired” by one of them - grandma absolutely refused to. She wanted to be her own mistress, not some old guy’s. One day he got on tram #29 and there was only a free spot, but it was beside a woman that he didn’t know so it would have been impolite for him to take it. Ah, but she patted it, indicating that he should! (She’s mistaken him for someone else) A well-dressed platinum blonde… he thought she’d be easy prey. HAH!
They’re turning 93 and 92 this year. Their first wedding was in '37; they had to repeat it in '40 (lots of papers lost and one-night-weddings during the civil war, so Franco’s government said people who couldn’t show papers had to re-wed). So next year it’s their 70th anniversary. They bitch no-end about each other, but since they’ve been one of those couples who had fights so they could make up, it’s just normal for them. They just happen to be more loud about it, since they’re both pretty deaf (thanks God, so are their neighbors).
Her parents: she was from a mining town in Teruel; her father had been an important personage but he’d died when she was little and her mother had taken up the kitchen at the train station. At age 13, she’d moved to Barcelona and taken up work as a cook. He was the firstborn of an Italian immigrant and an old-family mother; his family owned three butcher’s shops in three different markets (one per son) as well as quite a lot of land close to town. They met over a cut of lamb ribs. She thought she was making a “good wedding” but he was a bohemian, gambler, night owl… he died before I was born, but I remember her and she was still in love with him.
They were both thirteen. They were in confirmation class together. They married when they were both nineteen.
Their fifty-sixth anniversary is in a couple of weeks.
Regards,
Shodan