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?
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