I was talking some time ago with a young, but not very young, friend of the family about why she had not married.
“There’s nobody around here that is eligible,” she said.
“In New York City? Last time I counted, there were eight million people in New York.”
“They’re all married, or gay. Or both,” she said (making a joke, I surmised).
Still, this attractive and talented person—who said she wanted to get married—was not dating anyone.
Other people seem to have no trouble finding someone to marry. Most people get married eventually. Some get married repeatedly—seven or eight times. After my mother died, my father, who was sixty-four at the time, told me morosely that he would never find anyone like my mother; he then married two more times in the space of the next three years. Over the years that I have been a practicing psychiatrist, I have known a number of people who married the same person twice, and, recently, someone who married the same person three times! I have never understood these repeat marriages to be in response to a dearth of other potential partners. It is just that getting away from a spouse for a while sometimes allows a couple to remember all the good times they had together back in the beginning of their marriage. They tend to forget those other matters that led to their divorce—until they remarry. Of course, other divorces lead to a deathless and unvarying enmity