Archive for February 13th, 2013

Just how much older are local grooms than their brides?

Wednesday, February 13, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Vintage Cake Topper

Vintage Cake Topper (Photo credit: vintage19_something)

If you grabbed a copy of the Connecticut Post, Danbury News-Times, Stamford Advocate or Greenwich Time Thursday morning, you likely saw a story about the fact that local grooms are the oldest in the nation to make their way down the aisle. And brides are near the top, too.

According to Census data, Connecticut grooms wait longer than men in any other state to say “I do,” with a median age at first marriage of 30.9 years old, while Connecticut brides wed at a median age of 28.7, the fourth highest in the nation.

You can read all about that in the paper, or online here, but that’s not the only interesting data tidbit that jumped off our marriage spreadsheets. There’s also the typical age difference between men and women when they get hitched.

On average, grooms in Southwestern Connecticut are two years and four months older than their brides, according to an analysis of 4,399 marriage licenses filed in Greenwich, Stamford, Darien, Fairfield, Norwalk, Bridgeport, Danbury and Bethel throughout 2012.

Of course, that figure ebbs and flows from town to town. For instance, Norwalk brides and grooms are the closes in age among the sample, with the average groom only one year and 10.5 months older than the average bride; they’re closely followed by Danbury, where grooms are an average of one year and 11 months older than their brides.

Then there’s Fairfield, the average age difference between husbands and wives married in 2012 was three years and seven months — almost a year bigger than the next widest gap in Greenwich, where grooms were an average of two years and eight months older than their brides.

Well, what about the largest age differences for couples married in 2012?

There were two couples with a 37-year age difference, married last year: A couple who wed in Danbury, with a 66-year-old groom and a 29-year-old bride; and a couple married in Norwalk, with a 62-year-old groom and a 25-year-old bride. In both cases, the groom had been married before, while the bride had not (and while we’re on the topic of multiple marriages, did you check out our story ‘Till Death Do Us Part?’ Not in Greenwich, which also ran Thursday).

While the numbers showed an overall trend of grooms who were older than brides, there were certainly couples with large gaps the other way around, like the Bridgeport wedding, where a 28-year-old groom married a 66-year-old bride. The 38-year age discrepancy was the largest between an older bride and her younger groom, and in this case the bride  had been married before while it was the groom’s first go-around.

What do you think is the perfect age gap between brides and grooms?

Nutmeggers movin’ on out

Wednesday, February 13, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Screenshot of migration patterns from United Van Lines.

Connecticut has the seventh highest percentage of movers shipping out of the state in the nation, according to a recent study released by a moving company.

United Van Lines conducts a survey each year, tracking which states the company’s customers move into and out of over the course of a year, and found that 56 percent of the moves it performed in Connecticut during 2012 were customers movin’ on out.

Most of the cities with the top outbound populations can be found along the east coast, according to the moving company, which noted that “The Northeast is the most well-represented region on the high-outbound traffic list. In addition to New Jersey, New York (58 percent), Maine (56 percent) and Connecticut (56 percent) are also included” on its website.

So who took the cake? Here’s the list of the top five states movers are leaving:

  1. New Jersey – 62.3 percent
  2. Illinois – 59.5 percent
  3. West Virginia – 57.9 percent
  4. New York – 57.7 percent
  5. New Mexico – 57.6 percent

Washington, D.C., had the highest rate of in-migration, where 64 percent of moves were for people moving into the city. Surprisingly, Oregon came in second, with 61 percent of moves commissioned for new state residents.

The company has been conducting this study since 1977, and this year’s analysis included data from more than 125,000 moves, according to United. They defined states as “high inbound” if 55 percent or more of the moves are going into a state and “high outbound” if 55 percent or more moves were coming out of a state or “balanced” if the difference of inbound and outbound is negligible.

While the 56 percent may sound like a lot for Connecticut, the state shouldn’t worry about creating an ad campaign just yet; the 1,991 outbound Nutmmegers represent less than 1/20th of a percent of Connecticut’s population. Read more.

Are you surprised? Or have you seen it happen again and again? Let us know in the comments section below.

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