Elizabeth moved to New York with a plan.
After graduating from a top-ranked law school in the South, she’d landed a job as a young attorney at a Big Law firm. She was ready to start the life, at 25, she’d been dreaming of — not only working as a lawyer but dating with an eye toward marriage.
She remembers thinking, “I’ve got my job, I’m in a city, I’m going to settle into like the rest of my life, so it makes sense to date.”
Things did not go so smoothly. The long hours were only part of the problem. Most of the guys in their 20s Elizabeth met in Manhattan were not interested in marriage.
The men who did seem interested in marriage were older than she felt comfortable with. New York was simply “a challenging dating place” because “people are often on different pages, whether it’s religiously, culturally” or relationally, as “some people are just there for a good time, and some are there to settle down.” It was hard to find a man who was a good match and interested in marriage.
Elizabeth is like many students who graduate from elite colleges and universities. They are ambitious, smart, and attractive. Their plan is to successfully launch their career in their 20, find their person in their late 20s or early 30s, and then get married in their 30s.
But the primary focus in their 20s is on career — a “Midas mindset” that prioritizes professional success instead of love and marriage.
For many students graduating from prestigious universities, this means moving to big cities such as New York, Los Angeles or Washington, DC, to work in finance, consulting, law, government, entertainment, and other industries.
What they do not realize is that maximizing career prospects isn’t always good for your love life. Location matters not just for professional opportunities, but also your odds of marriage.
If you’re seeking to maximize your odds of tying the knot as a young adult (between 22 and 39), the best places to do that are not the big coastal cities, but cities and towns in Middle America, the South, and parts of the Rocky Mountain West.
In our new report, “Mapping Marriage in America,” for the Institute for Family Studies, we found that cities and towns in states such as Utah, Indiana, Colorado, Florida, Tennessee and Texas were especially conducive to wedlock.
Not surprisingly, Mormon-dominated Provo, Utah, led with more than 1-in-10 never-married adults aged 22-39 putting a ring on it last year. But marriage is also higher in places like Colorado Springs, Colorado, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and Franklin, Tennessee where nearly 1-in-10 never-married young adults married last year.
The numbers in coastal cities are markedly lower. In these cities, around 1 in 20 young adults who have never been married are putting a ring on it in any given year.
Evidently, Elizabeth was not the problem. It was the broader dating and marriage culture in cities like the Big Apple.
What places like Provo, Fort Walton Beach, Colorado Springs, Fort Wayne, and Nashville have going for them are marriageable men and a marriage friendly culture.
All four have above average levels of single men working full-time and high shares of the population who are married. Many of them host military bases full of young men who are gainfully employed and often more marriage-minded than civilians around them.
Elizabeth’s personal reckoning came on her sister’s staircase. This past spring, she visited her sister, who’d just had her third child — the same day Elizabeth learned she landed a plum promotion at a big law firm in Dallas.
She realized something the Midas mindset never warned her about: “I have achieved what almost any person would want their child to achieve,” she said. “And it is very empty.” At that moment, Elizabeth wished she had her sister’s life.
Her advice to 20somethings cuts against the Midas mindset: “Don’t think you’re too young to get married,” she said. “It’s more about finding the right person than being the right age.”
But our new research indicates that finding that person can also be a function of geography: Go somewhere with a strong marriage culture and plenty of marriage-minded men, and the odds tilt your way; stay in a place where marriage is not as important and marriage-minded men are scarce, and it’s harder to find your person.
To be sure, there are many factors that go into the calculus of that first move — where you get a job offer, how close your family is, what your friends are doing, and whether or not you are already in a promising relationship.
But if you’re single and don’t wish to stay that way, consider moving somewhere like Nashville at the start of your career, not New York.
Brad Wilcox is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
Ken Burchfiel is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.
Wendy Wang is a Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Institute for Family Studies
This story originally appeared on NYPost
