Why Do People Get Married?

Modern Love

The New York Times

Love, New York Times, Nytimes, Essay, Loss, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Redemption, Nyt

4.3 • 9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to our season premiere. Seven years into a serious relationship, Jake Maynard got a text from his mother: “Gramma Gert: 3, Jake: 0.” This was her way of telling him that his grandmother, in her 80s, was getting married for the third time, while Jake remained unmarried and childless in his late 20s. His family found this strange. Stranger still, at least in Jake’s view, was his grandmother’s choice of partner. (You’ll have to listen to the episode.) Today, we explore how two generations of the same family — 50 years apart — grapple with identity, tangled kin and the loaded question of marriage.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Dan Jones and I'm Mealy and we are the editors of Modern Love at the New York Times
0:22.1	Welcome back for a new season of the Modern Love podcast
0:25.4	A Modern Love be published essays every week that explore the complicated love lives and relationships of real people
0:34.4	And on this podcast we'll bring you the best of those stories
0:38.4	The essay we're bringing you today is called Trying to Keep Up with Grandma's Love Life
0:44.4	An inspiring essay I think gets mostly about how to live your life and how to love
0:50.4	Without fear of social expectations or judgment
0:55.4	Yeah, what I was struck by in this essay is how we often like young people especially say they try to avoid what their parents and grandparents have done in relationships
1:05.4	And in this case it's like the opposite
1:08.4	I think it's kind of subversive
1:10.4	It's true
1:12.4	It's written by Jake Maynard and read by McLeod Andrews
1:26.4	Three years ago my mother sent me a text that read
1:30.4	Grandma Gert III Jake Zero
1:35.4	The joke was that her 80 year old mother Gert was getting married for a third time while I at 28 was still single
1:47.4	But the twist which might be too strange to even joke about was that Gert soon to be husband was her former brother-in-law Bill
1:56.4	Uncle Bill had been married to Gert's sister
2:02.4	He was also heading into his third marriage at 79
2:06.4	The previous spouses had died, three from cancer and one from a heart attack
2:13.4	My family has always been thick and messy
2:18.4	Spread like soft cheese across two counties in the most rural part of Pennsylvania
2:23.4	And more and more our family tree was beginning to seem a little folk-narian
	...

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