<p>If you found and married the love of your life in college was it in a big university 10,000 plus or a small university. Just curious to see if small universities promote more socializing or do they limit the pool!</p>
<p>We lived on the same floor at a large university (Columbia).</p>
<p>I met him the day after my hs grad, we dated through college. He went to UMD and I went to a small college(600 grad). His roommates and friends had girlfriends that they met there and eventually married. I can only recall 1 couple out of my college friends who met and married their mate at our small school…my vote it is probably the exact same %.</p>
<p>Well, I’m not actually married to the love of my life yet but I will be next year! 
We both went to a large university (~16,000 students) - he was in some of the same clubs/societies as some of my friends and we met that way. </p>
<p>That seems to be the way for lots of the engaged/married couples I know - none of them just met randomly, but lots of them met through being involved in the same extra curricular activities.</p>
<p>There are your roommates. </p>
<p>There are the people you know from high school or from your home town.</p>
<p>Moving one step farther out, there are the roommates of people you know from high school. And there are people who went to high school or grew up in the same town with your roommates. </p>
<p>This sort of thing can lead to a considerable circle of acquaintances and potential love interests even without a lot of extracurricular activities.</p>
<p>My future husband and I attended the same university for several years, although we had met earlier; our families lived in adjacent towns, and we both had summer jobs at the same store. Attending the university wasn’t what brought us together, but our presence there brought another couple together. One of my roommates ended up marrying the guy who had a desk next to my then-fiance in his graduate department’s office. Those two met each other through us.</p>
<p>As I said earlier DH and I met the day after my HS grad. He grad. the yr before, we went to the same middle and High school, I was friends with his best friends and never met him until I graduated (class was 843). </p>
<p>IMHO it was fate, we jokingly say we were soul mates and cherubs together in heaven on little clouds. </p>
<p>Always remember what is said at a wedding “what G*d put together let no man tear assunder”. Not trying to be religious, just believing in that we were destined and found each other when it was the right time</p>
<p>My DD is “living” your question right now! She will graduate this May and met her fiance at the large state U (@25,000 enrollment) she attends. However, they both were in the honors program and living in scholarship halls, which have their own government, social activities, etc. for the 500 students who reside there. Being lucky enough to live in the scholarship hall system really shrunk the size of that campus down to a manageable number and allows you to meet people of a “like mind”. They will marry this summer.</p>
<p>I have a friend who says that she read somewhere that 50% of people meet their spouses in college. Not sure where she got that statistic, but says it didn’t hold for her daughters. They attended Rice, Duke, and Northwestern and none of them met their spouses in college!</p>
<p>I met mine in high school- freshman year.</p>
<p>I met my wife when we were undergraduates at our mid-size university (5,000 undergraduates). I think I met her in the spring of my junior year (her sophomore year); she swears we met at least once the year before (which is entirely possible). In any event, we were friends but didn’t get romantically involved until after I graduated. To make matters a little more complicated, we were members of the same residential college (with about 350 people), although she mainly lived off campus. But that guaranteed that we had at least some overlap in our friendship circles, even though there was little or no overlap in our social styles, extracurriculars, or academic focuses. (We did take four of the same courses, but never at the same time, and participated in the same internship program in different years.) We definitely became friends because of the residential college connection – one of her best friends from freshman year was the girlfriend of one of my best friends and a future roommate, another of her freshman friends lived upstairs from me in my entryway when I was a junior. So even though we never socialized together in the same group, we would run into each other periodically (although, once we knew each other, that tended to happen in the library more than the residential college).</p>
<p>I know four other still-married couples from my cohort that formed when we were undergraduates. Two of them were more-or-less like us – unlikely opposites-attract pairings from the same residential college (what students now sometimes call “dormcest,” of which there was plenty, most of it not surviving long after graduation). The other two were more common shared-interest relationships where the couple met in activities. We also have another set of married friends who met when they were in the same dorm at a different mid-size university.</p>
<p>My (small) law school class at a somewhat larger university produced two married couples and a long-lived gay couple (who separated after about 20 years together). One of my cousins met his wife when they were undergraduates at that same university. Another cousin met his wife when they were seniors at a small (<2,500 undergraduates) university. And a third met her husband when she was a graduate student and he a law student at a mega-university. So that can happen, too.</p>
<p>My parents met when they were classmates at a much larger law school (and then they introduced one of my mother’s cousins who was a graduate student at the same university to one of my father’s law school friends, and they are still married over 50 years later). Actually, I know several couples from my parents’ generation who met in college or graduate school, often at large universities (since the small ones and LACs were mostly single-sex then). There were lots and lots of them once upon a time, but that generation’s marriages had a high casualty rate in the 60s-70s.</p>
<p>Found this blog on-line (thus the casual way it is written) that quotes a Wall Street Journal article regarding percentage of people finding their spouse at college vs work. I wasn’t able to find the actual WSJ article. </p>
<p>Love in the Time of Studying~</p>
<p>In the U.S., there is a long tradition of using schools as places for making romantic connections. In 1992, 23% of married Americans said that they meet their spouse at school (such as high school) or at the university. Only 15% of people said they met their spouse at work.</p>
<p>Now, things have changed. In 2006, a similar survey found that only 14% of U.S. married couples first met at school, and 18% met at work. The work figure has increased three percentage points, but the school/university number has gone down more dramatically. What is going on here?</p>
<p>While schools were always seen as a place where men and women had time to meet and develop romantic relationships, both men and women nowadays are getting married at a much later age than they did 20 years ago. The average age for a man in the U.S. to marry is 27.5 years; for a woman, its 25.5 years. There are many reasons for this change. An article today in the Wall Street Journal says that part of the reason is credential inflation at work. The article is saying that jobs nowadays require people to get higher and better qualifications (Masters degrees, for example) so that young people have to wait to marry so that they can finish this additional training. Perhaps this is one reason why Internet dating has become more popular. As people have fewer opportunities to meet eligible men and women, they need to find other ways of meeting people. College students now believe that they need to wait to marry, and so dont start looking for a potential spouse until after they leave school, even though college is probably the one time in their life where they will have a lot of time and opportunity to meet an eligible mate.</p>
<p>I went to my 20th about 5 years ago…believe it or not the couple who was King and Queen of the prom were still married, both went to different colleges, but got married afterwards…the couple everyone was looking for was the one that started dating in 9th grade. They too went to colleges in different states. Believe it or not they are still married (@ 30 yrs of being together). It is amazing to me especially since we are from a very suburbian area, and they both went to different colleges. Very few still live on our hometown as adults (too expensive)</p>
<p>In the end my HS has more married couples, than our friends from college. The ones who got married to their college sweethearts are divorced. The ones that married their HS sweetheart after they graduated from college are still married…isn’t that strange? </p>
<p>I consider Bullet and I as college sweethearts, but from the same town, I guess I am playing both sides</p>
<p>We met at a small LAC. We had a couple classes together and also crossed paths socially.</p>
<p>Midwest, I agree with the person you quoted. College students now just aren’t looking for “that special someone” while in school. It’s a waste of resources in my opinion.
Me - I met the right guy in the high school library. He had the giant blond afro. I was 16. It was a few more years until the relationship “took” but the idea was planted way back then.</p>
<p>Wow, too specific. NOT the love of my life, but was someone I married and had kids with (now divorced). Does that count? </p>
<p>In our case, big giant campus.</p>
<p>We were in our skivies last week, giving her invalid father a shower. I called her, Venus. She took the handheld and soaked me.</p>
<p>HAHAHA Love the shower story. Some fun stories and iteresting trends. High school sweethearts lasting longer than college! I just know that in the work force, it is hard to date, to many complications and work restrictions. I also think that young people are having a harder time growing up than we did and they shy away from responsibility.</p>
<p>My H and I started dating while we were students at a large public university. However, we met in junior high and had classes together throughout high school. A lot of my friends had crushes on him, so I kept my distance. A few years into college, when he asked me out, I figured it was time to take my turn.</p>
<p>We married after graduation, then both went on for further degrees. I don’t really understand why anyone would think it is necessary to wait to get married until all schooling is done with. As long as you are flexible (very) about where you will live and go to school, it is more fun to be students together.</p>
<p>I married my biology lab partner… and got divorced 2 years later. Not, as it turned out, the love of my life.</p>
<p>The love of my life–the man I fell HARD for the day I met him–I met at work; I was 27.</p>
<p>I’m so glad I met the love of my life in college where I had easy access to people with different interests. I’d hate to have to be married to another architect!</p>
<p>Oh and to the OP, college had about 6000 undergrads, many more grad students though some were effectively on different campuses.</p>
<p>I also met my H in college at a big public U. He was a first-year grad student and I was a sophomore. We got married within a year. Friends joked that I was a child bride. We look back very tenderly on our poor student days living in an efficiency appartment and riding bikes to campus. Somehow eked out a living wage from his research assistantship and my waitressing job. We had a grand time.</p>