Write me a short blog post about how many people marry their high school sweethearts or people who marry someone they knew while they were a minor.
Despite the oft-repeated stories, only around 2% of people end up marrying someone they had a relationship with during their high school careers. This number is a serious decrease from the 40's, 50's, and 1960's when nearly half of people were marrying the person who they would classify as their first love. In fact, this idea of the first love can be seriously detrimental to marriages in jeopardy. Above anyone else, reconnected first loves have the highest rate of infidelity with one another when married to other people. 

Most brides in this day and age marry at the age of 26, five years older than the average age of brides in the 1970s. This means that to get to marriage, many couples would already have spent nearly a decade together. Now that women make up a significant percentage of the workforce, it's more likely for long-lasting couples to have met at work than in school. There is also a higher likelihood of couples who meet in the workplace having interests and social circles in common, both of which are factors leading to more successful outcomes in marriage. 

Another reason that high school sweethearts circle back to one another is the perceived comfort. There's something about the first love that is deeply comforting. It usually comes from a time in our lives when our parents were still caring for us but we had an element of freedom. Most of us didn't have financial responsibilities or work requirements that were onerous. We were able to focus on social bonds and experience the power of those bonds for the first time. After children and mortgages or costly rents weigh on us, it can be appealing to revert to that time in our lives when we were cared for and explored both the world around us and the people in it with a sense of safety. 


