Nowadays, young people have incredibly different experiences in the context of finding love than their grandparents used to. To investigate this phenomenon, Aziz Ansari talked to many people of age in some retirement homes in New York. He bribed the old with coffee and doughnuts, and they told him their marriage stories in return.

In contrast to young people who have access to various means of transportation now, their grandparents did not have this opportunity at the same age. Not surprisingly, a third of nursing home residents said they had met their betrothed in their neighborhood. Some research revealed that many couples who got married in Philadelphia in 1932 lived within a five-block radius of each other. On the other hand, today, the youth do not sit still, constantly moving from one place to another, and therefore, the likelihood that they will meet their love on the next street is decreasing.

“Emerging adulthood” is the term used to define the period of a person’s life when they leave the families they were born in but do not build their own. However, if you ask any older women whose marriage took place in the 1950s, you may be impressed. Most of these women didn’t have this time at all. They lived under their parents’ roof until they were adults, and then relocated to their husbands’ houses.

It is essential to emphasize that in those days, even if a woman had the right to choose a husband, her parents, one way or another, still played a big role in this event. Every family wanted their future son-in-law to be a man with a good job and name. In addition, women then did not have much access to education. The development of their interests was not a priority because they had to become good wives before they had a chance to develop their personalities. The reason for this may be that so-called adulthood in those times was completely different from today. Until the 1970s, the average age at which women in the United States entered into marriage was 20, and men didn’t go much further, typically marrying at 23.