I noticed an interesting pattern at my ten year high school reunion (some years ago.) It seemed like those who married in or just after high school married someone who was very close alphabetically, as in Judy Jones married John Kaplan. A marriage 5, 10, 15 years later showed this correlation much less.
My theory is that since my teachers had seating charts and we always sat alphabetically, year after year, we all had to sit next to people who were alphabetically close to us. This nearness breeds familiarity.
So, for a social experiment, would you tell the world here:
a) How many years out of high school did you marry?
b) How many letters different alphabetically is your last name from your spouse?
It does not matter if the marriage ended in divorce or anything like that.
Optional questions:
c) How big was your high school graduating class?
d) Did your teachers sit you alphabetically?
For example:
a) I married when I was 21.
b) I married someone whose last name is 6 letters away from mine.
c) My high school graduating class was about 666 (Ominous, huh?)
d) My teachers sat us alphabetically up until at least junior high. I don’t remember whether they did or not in high school. (So long ago!)
Did I not mention that I am not going for a statistically valid study? The first problem, would be that a statistically valid group of people don’t even read The Straight Dope.
a) 9 years
b) 9 (hers starts with D, mine with M)
c) 75 (all boys; it was a Catholic school)
d) Memory is a little fuzzy, but while I’m pretty certain we had assigned seating for most of our classes, my recollection is that it was only infrequently done alphabetically.
I’m going to screw up your data, because I got married 30 years after high school to a woman whose last name is one letter off from mine. The rest of the question are irrelevant since she’s from an opposite coast.
Even my high school data wouldn’t work - I dated several girls within 3 letters of me, but they were from different graduating years so we never shared a class.
But neither my wife nor I could have married anyone from our respective high-school class: we both went to single-sex high schools. There is, however, one other married couple, each of which is from the same class as we were, even though the schools were about 50 miles apart.
My first marriage (which ended many years ago) was 10 years out of high school. We had the same last initial. However, not only did we not go to school together, we didn’t grow up in the same state. I grew up in Ohio, he grew up in Maine, we met and married in the Virginia suburbs of DC.
There’s a lot of other factors you need to consider before coming to a conclusion. First, how do you define “alphabetically close”? Second, this chart on the distribution of initial letters in US surnames should help in figuring out what is expected by chance. (Although our sample size here is going to be much too small, I expect.)
Third, in an average classroom of, say, 25-30 students, the only people likely to be really alphabetically close are the ones immediately to your left and right (or in front and in back, depending on how your teacher designed the charts). The students in the orthogonal direction and kitty corners should be a good bit farther separated from you alphabetically. If your definition of “close” is padded enough to reflect this, I’m afraid you’ll have difficulty separating a significant observation from stats.
If your theory is based on the seating charts, why not just ask people who married their high school sweethearts directly?
First marriage 1 year out of high school 11 letters (husband from 2000 miles from home town.) Second marriage 19 years after HS, 2 letters from maiden name. Third marriage 36 years after HS, 6 letters from maiden name.
I married 8 years out of highschool.
My husband’s name and my name start with the same letter. My name has 10 letters and his has 7.
I don’t remember enough to answer the rest.
Married the October after graduating college, so 4 1/2 years after high school. My bride-to-be would have crossed the stage directly in front of me if another student hadn’t paid whatever overdue library fees or whatever it was that caused her to miss rehearsal and wound up between us, so our names were really close alphabetically (same first two letters, her third letter was an e, mine is an o).
I was 23 when I married someone whose last name was 5 letters away from me. However, we graduated two years apart and in two different states.
I’m not sure how your theory works out in the real world, because in my experience, most of my classmates did not marry each other, whether they married right out of school or 10 years later. Of the four couples I can think of who did marry classmates (which I define as “people who graduated from the same school in the same year”), only one couple was even in the same home room.
The curious thing is that three out of the four couples who did marry, one spouse had a a last name starting with W. They married a “D”, “M”, and “O”.
And how do we count the classmate whose name started with W but married an “A” who was a year behind us?
It’s interesting that the letter “M” is the most common surname initial in the U.S. Since M is smack dab in the middle of the alphabet, it means a preponderence of people will marry someone with last names in the closer half of the alphabet. And since X, Y, and Z together account for less than one percent of surnames, 99 percent of people will marry someone within 23 letters of their last name.
1 out of 15.7 random pairings will have the same first letter. 1 out of every 3.8 will be within 3 letters (e.g., ‘M’ + ‘P’). 50% of pairings are within 7 letters.
a) How many years out of high school did you marry? 7
b) How many letters different alphabetically is your last name from your spouse? 6
It does not matter if the marriage ended in divorce or anything like that.
Optional questions:
c) How big was your high school graduating class? <300
d) Did your teachers sit you alphabetically? Mostly starting in junior high and continuing through college
This is interesting. I will be attending my 50’th reunion in the fall. I can only remember one couple marrying within the class and they were 7 letters apart. Hummm, close enough to have ended up beside each other.