Can you imagine anything more romantic, personal, and memorable than a proposal at a pizza chain? Pizza Hut is offering a deluxe Valentine’s Day proposal package that includes an engagement ring (no diamonds though -it’s ruby), photographer, videographer, limousine, fireworks, and a ten dollar pizza! The cost? Just $10,010. Better hurry and reserve your package, because they are only selling ten of them. But hey, if you miss out on the deal, you can a) make your proposal a surprise, 2) do it in a more personal place, and c) save enough money to pay for a nice wedding and/or honeymoon. Link -via Jezebel

"Till death do us part" does not apply to this tragic love story from Thailand, where a man decided to marry his bride, who died in a car accident just days before their planned wedding.

Oddity Central has the story of the real life corpse bride:

Merely days before the wedding, Sarinya was involved in a car crash, leaving her severely injured. She still could have been saved with timely medical attention. However, the doctors made her wait for 6 hours due to an overcrowded ICU instead of transferring her to another hospital. During this time, she succumbed to her injuries and passed away.

Deffy and Sarinya had been together for 10 years, before they finally decided to settle down. They had postponed the wedding several times, due to busy schedules and the fact that Deffy wanted to complete his education before he got married. However, after Sarinya’s untimely death, he couldn’t let her go without fulfilling her deepest desire. So, he decided to marry her anyway. On the 4th of January, in Buddhist ceremony, Deffy married the corpse of his girlfriend. The event took place in Surin, a city in northern Thailand. During the ceremony, he expressed his devotion and deep love for Sarinya.

Link (Photo: MThai)

Karam Chand was born in a small rural village in the Punjab in northern India in 1905.

His family worked in farming and, in keeping with the custom of the time, he married at a young age.

His bride Kartari was born in the same district in 1912. According to their passports, that currently makes Mr Chand 106 and his wife 99 years old.

They wed in a typical Sikh ceremony in December 1925 and have just celebrated their 86th year together as a married couple, which they think may qualify them as the UK’s longest married husband and wife.

The Chands live with one of their eight children. They also have 27 grandchildren and 23 great grandchildren. Link -via Arbroath

In the 1860s nearly all women managed to get hitched. Today, with a better gender ratio, only 22% of adults aged 18-29 are married and only 44.9% of adults in all adult age groups have ever been married. The median ages for first marriages have moved way up as well–from 23 for men and 20 for women in 1960 to 28 and 26, respectively, today. Divorce is hovering at the 50% rate.

‘Major attitudinal shifts’

Bolick notes that for women, marriage is now “an option rather than a necessity,” citing a dwindling pool of educated, committed men, a new majority of women in the workplace, a tanking economy, IVF and adoption, the rise of non-traditional families and marriage arrangements, and a dissipating “spinster” stigma.

Bolick represents the intentionally single thirty- or forty-something. The newest generation eschewing nuptials is the tech-savvy and generally liberal Millennial. With education leveling the playing field, opportunities to earn something beyond the MRS might just be higher on a girl’s list of priorities. Likewise, the responsibility of career, house and family (married or not) is what Sex at Dawn co-author Christopher Ryan calls “swimming upstream.” It’s perhaps inevitable that fewer women take it on.

Today’s women are professionally and financially more established, so they should be all that more appealing to males. They are, generally, but not in a “find The One and keep her” way. Men are also opting to remain single as long as they are happy. “If you have four quality women you’re dating and they’re in a rotation, who’s going to rush into a marriage?” asks Ralph Richard Banks, author of Is Marriage for White People? In response, Rod Dreher at the American Conservative lays it out: “Throw out traditional morality for an ethic of libertinism and you get men being what biology has programmed them to be. In this way, feminism, whatever its benefits for women, has hurt them.”

Changing expectations

Dreher’s insistence that being unmarried is a ‘hurt’ to the purposely single woman is debatable. But it’s clear that the expectations of marriage have changed rapidly over the last half-century. Women are not expected to be June Cleaver, and men are not expected to shoulder the full financial burden alone. And they can even cohabitate now without the nasty rumors that haunted earlier generations.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that healthy relationships are, or the desirability of the pair bond are declining. One could argue that without the legal constraints, the odds of finding a working, healthy relationship increase. Add to this the growing presence of nontraditional family groups (friends and extended family as family) and relatively commonplace single-parent household, and what you get is a less strict idea of what normal relationships are.

In Mexico City, in a move to counter high divorce rates, lawmakers have proposed a two-year marriage license. The trial-by-marriage would give newlyweds “an easy exit strategy” by allowing them to mutually decide whether or not to renew. Whether this is better than having never married at all is a completely different debate, but points out how marriage is not what it once was.

Tradition? Buck tradition.

Marriage as we know it is a relatively new concept. It wasn’t until marriage was used to procure and maintain land-ownership that the couple was limited in breaking that bond without permission. And when your husband or wife is chosen for their respective acreages, affection is an afterthought, if a thought at all.

And yes, a certain non-zero percentage of the population is still denied marriage by (most) state laws. Typically it’s argued that this denial of rights is to protect traditional marriage, but clearly marriage before the last century and since is not what we would call “traditional.”

Bolick’s article makes several major points that aren’t included here. But given that gender parity and economic downturn and the changing boundaries of social acceptance have come together to throw a wrench in our standard American Marriage, Bolick might be onto something.

Do you think that the declining marriage rates in the US are a problem, or is it just a shift in expectations from relationships and adulthood? Or, if you prefer: Is less marriage better, or worse?

Sources:

• All the Single Ladies
• The Atlantic‘s ‘Single Ladies’ cover story: 6 takeaways
• NBC Celebrates ‘End of Traditional Marriage,’ Perpetual Female Singlehood
• In U.S., Proportion Married at Lowest Recorded Levels
• Decline of men, decline of marriage
• ‘Til 2013 do us part? Mexico City mulls 2-year marriage

So here’s the story: it’s 1728 and you live in Amberg, a little Bavarian town somewhere north of Munich. You and your lady friend really, really want to get married, but there is a little snag; the council laws permit only homeowners to marry, and you’re still stuck renting a place. But all is not lost! You pick up a little strip of empty land between two other buildings – just 2.5 meters wide. You run up a quick wall on the front, another on the back, slap a roof on top, and presto – you’re a homeowner. The council falls for it, and allows you to get married.

But now what? Well, it’s not liveable, so you head back to the rental place to live, but you recoup your investment by selling the Eh’häusl (Little Wedding House) to the next couple with the same problem.

Link to story. Link to hotel site.

(Image: Google Street View)

With this ring, I thee wed .... and with this one, I thee ... divorce?

That's right - jewelers Spritzer and Furman created this symbolic ring to commemorate the ending of a marriage. At $3,200 it's a cheap price to pay for saying goodbye to someone you (used to) love. (It's something to add to your Divorce Registry!)

Link - via The Week

Previously on Neatorama: Guillotine Divorce Ring

Be warned, if you tend to cry after watching emotionally-charged moments, this article (particularly the videos) might have you spraying your computer with tears. I know I was misty-eyed while writing it.

1. Borderlands

I have to admit, this just might be my favorite wedding proposal ever. Ben and his girlfriend, Tora, were both seriously addicted to the popular Gearbox RPG shooter Borderlands. That’s why when Ben decided to ask Tora to marry him, he decided to ask Gearbox for help popping the question. The company’s response was more positive than Ben ever could have hoped for, as they spent a week working on a special Borderlands-themed wedding proposal video for the couple. It even featured a few hilarious quips from the robot character, Claptrap.

Ben got all of Tora’s friends and family members together under the guise of throwing her a birthday party and unveiled the video by saying he got a hold of a new Borderlands trailer. Needless to say, after watching the video, Tora’s response was a big fat “yes,” although she did later admitted that she was a little upset that Ben got to go to the Gearbox studio without her.

Video links #1 and #2

2. Mario

This guy and his girlfriend both seriously love Mario (if you couldn’t tell already by looking at the room) so in order to ask his girlfriend to marry him, he set up a functional Mario question mark box that would drop the ring when she hit it with her head. While the set up is exactly as geeky as you might expect, it’s surprisingly emotionally touching when she tries to hold back her tears as she jumps to hit the box.

Video link

3. Bejeweled

If your girlfriend loves the game Bejeweled and you happen to be a software programmer, you can do something above and beyond if you’re so inclined. Or at least, that’s what Bernie Peng did when he decided to propose, using his programming skills to create a custom Bejeweled game. Once the score got high enough, the regular screen would clear out and a ring would appear on the DS screen. Bernie then dropped to one knee and presented her with a pink ring that looked like it belonged in the game.

As if the story weren’t great enough on its own, the company that makes Bejeweled was so impressed by Bernie’s proposal that they offered to pay for the couple’s honeymoon and they volunteered to supply all of the wedding guests with a free version of Bejeweled. Now that’s a great way to capitalize on the publicity of the wedding proposal!

4. Google Maps

Michael Weiss-Malik’s girlfriend already agreed to marry him during a low-key, at home proposal, but Michael felt the occasion needed more pizazz, so he moved on to his proposal 2.0 plan, which involved a hot tip he learned at work. Did I mention Michael works at Google?

When the Google Street View car was set to drive by the company’s headquarters, everyone was invited to go outside and wave at the car, but Michael opted to do something even more memorable. He dressed in some kind of animal costume and stood outside holding a banner that read “Proposal 2.0 Marry Me Leslie!!”

Then, instead of emailing her the link directly, he asked internet users to email her and tell her why she should marry Michael or to link to his website that included the Google Street View scene.

5. Muppets

Anyone can order a custom Muppet doll to propose for them, but Sid Ceaser decided to go one step further by making a three minute long, professional-looking video staring Muppets made to look like him and his girlfriend. He then brought her to the movies where the proposal film was played before the feature presentation. When she said yes, the lights came on, revealing that her friends and family made up the entire theater audience.

Video link

6. Light Writing

Light Writing Proposal from Derick Childress on Vimeo.

Light graffiti involves using lights and a camera to “tag” a building or other surface. Usually, it’s taken close up in one long-exposure shot, but when one photographer decided to use the technique to ask his girlfriend to marry him, the production got pretty massive pretty fast. In order to spell out “Emily Will You Marry Me?” the photographer decided to shoot the massive light letters from a high vantage point that would show a huge chunk of downtown Raleigh.

After scouting out the perfect building, he rented a hotel room there and had his friends help him shoot the images and throw out the lights to create the writing. The process was incredibly tedious and technical, but if you want to learn more about how it was done, his website has a lot more information. If you don’t care about the technical side of things, the video shows all you need to know…how the lights spelled out his message.

Video link

7. LOL Cats

I Can Has Cheezburger played a critical role in this marriage proposal, where a man used photos of his cat and ICHC’s classic LOL builder to create a one-of-a-kind proposal that went on the site’s front page. When she gave her answer, they added a few captioned pics of the girl with her kitty to the post so everyone knew she gave a resounding “afurrmitive” to the question.

8. Comics

As a freelance artist who has worked on a number of major comic books, Leigh Gallagher knew he didn’t spend enough time at home or give his girlfriend nearly enough attention. That’s why he made sure his proposal comics were filled with heart-filled confessions, humor and an unbelievable attention to detail. Despite his self-confessed flaws, the comics made one thing abundantly clear: Leigh is one heck of a catch.

If all the touchy-feeliness of this article has gotten to you and you want to read about a few proposals that haven’t gone this smoothly, then you might want to check out this older Neatorama article featuring 14 Romantic Gestures Gone Terribly Wrong.

Of course, if you are feeling the emotions here, feel free to share your own proposal stories in the comments!

In 1950, this quiz (for women) appeared in the comic book “Boy Meets Girl” issue #3. See the rest of the quiz, and the answers (although they are upside down and you really don’t need them, do you?) at Gamma Squad. Link -via Buzzfeed

“The days of Ozzie and Harriet have faded into the past,” said William Frey, the senior demographer at Brookings who analyzed the data. [...]

Today, traditional patterns have been turned upside down. Women with college degrees are now more likely to marry than those with just high school diplomas, the reverse of several decades ago, said June Carbone, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-author of “Red Families v. Blue Families.”

Rising income inequality has divided American society, making college-educated people less likely to marry those without college degrees. Members of that educated group have struck a new path: they marry later and stay married. In contrast, women with only a high school diploma are increasingly opting not to marry the fathers of their children, whose fortunes have declined along with the country’s economic opportunities.

“Employment instability depresses marriage rates,” Ms. Carbone said. Explaining the reasoning, she said, “I can support myself and the kid, but not myself, the kid, and him.”

(Photo: Reluctant Groom from the NeatoShop)

A wedding ring is symbol of commitment and permanence. A tattoo is commitment and permanence in itself. Some couples are skipping the jewelry in favor of matching or complementary tattoos on the couple’s ring fingers. And why not? You don’t have to remove it to shower, work with machinery, or have an MRI. It can’t be lost or stolen. It will never have to be resized or replaced. And you can design your own unique symbols! See a variety of wedding band tattoos in this list by Shaun Usher. Link

That’s what Sarah Steiner figured, so forget Mr. Right – she wants Mr. Right, Inc. Frank Cerabino of The Palm Beach Post wrote:

Steiner, a former co-chair of the Green Party of Florida, said her perfect corporate husband would be environmentally conscious, socially responsible and "not evil."

"I will be looking for how they behaved in past mergers," she said. [...]

Steiner, who had a brief, human-on-human marriage during her teen years, figured that she might as well try to marry a corporation this time.

"I’m looking for the same thing that any girl is looking for – a partner," she said.

And a corporate partner has its advantages.

"Are you planning to have kids?" I asked her.

"Subsidiaries," she said. "Yes. Maybe even spinoffs."

Link

The spouses consistently overestimated their ability to communicate, and did so more with their partners than with strangers.

Prof Keysar’s colleague Prof Kenneth Savitsky said: "A wife who says to her husband, ‘it’s getting hot in here,’ as a hint for her husband to turn up the air conditioning a notch, may be surprised when he interprets her statement as a coy, amorous advance instead.

"Some couples may indeed be on the same wavelength, but maybe not as much as they think. You get rushed and preoccupied, and you stop taking the perspective of the other person, precisely because the two of you are so close."

Link

In the original 2003 research on the topic, economists Gordon Dahl, from the University of California-San Diego, and Enrico Moretti, at UC Berkeley, found that couples with a first-born girl were about 5 percent more likely to divorce than parents of a first-born boy. When there are as many as three daughters that difference spiked to 10 percent.

Researchers don’t know the cause, but have proposed many possibilities, from the presence of daughters making a mother more likely to leave an abusive husband to the idea that a man is more likely to marry a woman who is pregnant with his son. In any case, the statistics do not necessarily reflect the odds for an individual marriage. Link

(Image source: Clipart for Free)

Technically, the two are married. They file joint tax returns; she’s covered by his insurance. But they see each other just several times a year. “Since separating we get along better than we ever have,” he said. “It’s kind of nice.”

And at 58, he sees no reason to divorce. Their children have grown and left home. He asked himself: Why bring in a bunch of lawyers? Why create rancor when there’s nowhere to go but down?

“To tie a bow around it would only make it uglier,” Mr. Frost said. “When people ask about my relationship status, I usually just say: ‘It’s complicated. I like my wife, I just can’t live with her.’ ”

Pamela Paul of The New York Times has the story: Link

Wives spend 7,920 minutes a year nagging their husbands about household chores, their drinking and their health.

This equals two-and-a-half hours of earbashing each week – which totals 11 hours a month or five-and-a-half days a year.

A study of more than 3,000 people carried out by health campaign group Everyman concluded the most common subject women nagged their partners about was not helping to tidy the home.

I read it in The Daily Mail, so it must be true.

Link via Jammie Wearing Fool | Photo: Alamy | Previously: Psychologists Found Out That Nagging Doesn’t Work (Duh!)

It seems like more and more people met each other through the web. And now, there’s hard number to support this anecdotal evidence.

A study of more than 11,000 people by the online dating website Match.com and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey showed that 1 out of 6 marriages last year are between people who met through an online dating site. That’s more than twice the number of people who met at bars, clubs, and other social events combined! If you count committed relationships, the number jumps even higher to 1 out of 5.

The following details the way people have met their spouse over the last three years:

1) Through Work/School 36%
2) Through Friend/Family Member 26%
3) Via Online Dating Site 17%
4) Through Bars/Clubs/Other Social Events 11%
5) Other 7%
6) Through Church/Place of Worship 4%

“The world has changed,” said Greg Blatt, CEO of Match.com. “We get married older, we work longer hours, we move around more, we’re generally busier. These changes have put pressure on the way we traditionally have met our significant others. Luckily, with these changes has come an increasing openness to doing new things. Online dating has grown so much in part as a response to these societal changes, having become the third most important way we meet our significant others, even though it didn’t even exist 15 years ago.”

The study: Link [PDF] – Thanks Kendyl Wright! (Photo: Shutterstock)

That’s right, while some of the older set just can’t wrap their heads around Twitter (Twitter) (unless it’s connected to a fax machine), the Fishers will be all up on the microblogging site this V-Day, dispensing pearls of wisdom to the younger set (for whom the sanctity of marriage has already been destroyed by Facebook). The whole project was dreamed up by blinkbox, which is an on-demand movie and TV website in the UK.

Link and Link via Urlesque | Twitter Page | Photo: Mashable

There are many practical reasons to marry a dead spouse. For example, when an unmarried woman has no children to take care of her in old age, she can be "married" into another family. If a son died before he has descendants, his parents can arrange a ghost marriage to provide a "wife" who remains chaste, as a pretext to adopt a grandson to continue the family line. Another reason is to give the deceased a "spouse and companion" in the afterlife.

How is a ghost marriage performed? Singapore Paranormal Investigators has the story:

Next, the priest empowered the East Gate with a lighted joss paper folded in the shape of a cone, which is also known as the "fire brush". Soon after this, the priest struck the paper gate three times with the sword and declared the gate to be opened at his order. At the same time, the family members were to shout out the name of the deceased. Finally, the priest declared, "From the East Gate, out you come" The whole atmosphere became very tense as the ceremony was going on. [...]. After the "destruction" of all the gates, the priest took a paper effigy out from the centre of the squared shape model. This meant that the spirit had been rescued from the gates of hell.

The paper effigy was placed in front of the altar by the priest. Beside the paper effigy, there was another effigy which was much taller and larger in size. Madam Tham continued to explain to SPI, "The paper effigy which was just rescued from hell represents the current state of the spirit, she carries the illness and sufferings she had when she was alive. The much larger paper effigy next to her represents the healthier form. The priest will soon heal her spirit and she will regain her original healthy form again."

Artist Guy Shield proposed to his girlfriend Liz through a series of folded, sequential illustrations. He invested a lot of time in process, and you can read his sweet, romantic, and heavily-illustrated story at the link.

The plan was to create a series of images that I could work on at home, without giving away too much about the end (folded) result. The images would act both individually and as a series of captured moments of the irrelevant and mundane, utilising street-signs, strange signage and various forms of odd-ball graffiti to spell out the proposal. And naturally, when she’d ask me what I was working on, I could easily say “oh, I’m practising my hand created type because it needs A LOT of practice” and I’d be out of trouble. The hardest trick was working out how I could form the word ‘MARRY’ because just putting it into an individual image would blow my unique cover.

Link via DudeCraft

The next time a married man or woman glances your way, you might think twice before acting on impulse and frolicking between satin sheets. The scorned spouse could sue you.

Yes, you read that right. You, the paramour, can get hit with a lawsuit that could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They’re known as "alienation of affection" suits, when an "outsider" interferes in a marriage. The suits are allowed in seven states: Hawaii, Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota and Utah.

The law allowing such legal action dates back to antiquated times when a wife was considered the property of a husband. A broken-hearted hubby could go after his wife’s lover — not with a gun, but with the law.

Wayne Drash of CNN has more on the "alienation of affection" lawsuits: Link

No, seriously. The study found that marrying smarter and younger women results in less fewer divorces and greater marriage bliss:

The researchers studied interviews of more than 1,500 couples who were married or in a serious relationship. Five years later, they followed up 1,000 of the couples to see which had lasted.

They found that if the wife was five or more years older than her husband, they were more than three times as likely to divorce than if they were the same age.

If the age gap is reversed, and the man is older than the woman, the odds of marital bliss are higher.

Link (Image: a Halloween costume from BuyCostumes)

Wok Kundor has been happily married for four years to her husband, a man 70 years her junior.

But since he left their village in northern Terengganu state for a drug rehabilitation program in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, Wok has had a gnawing feeling.

"She said that she has been feeling insecure lately and she needs to find out whether he still loves her or not," said R.S.N. Murali, a reporter for The Star. The English-language Malaysian daily was among several local media outlets reporting on the lifelong romantic.

"She is worried he might not come back after his program and find himself a younger wife," Murali said.

If so, Wok has her eyes set on a 50-year-old man, but hopes it does not come to that.

Link (Photo: The Star)

So for a long time, mathematicians believed that, given 100 choices (each of which has to be chosen or discarded after the interview) you should discard the first 50 and then choose the next best one. (The assumption also is that if you don’t choose the first 99, you have to choose number 100, which, again, seems rather realistic to me. I know so many people who have chosen the last resort out of perceived necessity rather than, say, happiness.)

The “Discard 50 then Choose the Next Best” method apparently gives you a 25 percent chance of choosing the best candidate.

However, then along came John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University. I do not believe they were married. However, they came upon the idea that the magic number is, in fact, 37. Yes, you should stop after 37 candidates and choose the next best one. This number was apparently derived by taking the number 100 and dividing by e, the base of the natural logarithms (around 2.72). And it apparently increases your chances of the best choice to 37 percent.

Link via The Corner

Image: U.S. Department of Energy

What is unusual is when they divorce because she can’t keep up with him. That’s what happened to Kristin Georgi, a 22-year-old blonde who married 84-year-old lumber magnate Joe Hardy:

The lavish lifestyle could not overcome the newlyweds’ incompatibility. Georgi said they divorced because Hardy’s life was too fast for her — not because of their difference in age. The couple announced their divorce in August 2007 and approved by a judge in April 2008.

"Everyone asks, ‘Wasn’t it weird?’" Georgi said. "It really wasn’t because he was very young at heart. So, he was very hard for me to keep up with … When you climb on your own jet for the 10th time and everything in four days — Europe was crazy — and we were in each place for a day and a half. It was a bit too fast-paced for me," Georgi said.

Georgi said she left the relationship with some money, but she believes that size of the settlement vindicates her.

Georgi said the demands of such a lavish life took her away from her first love, saying she chose [her son] Matthew over marriage.

Link