After Graduation, The Honeymoon

This time of year, Miki G. Cohen ’06 has a lot on her mind.

“Getting registered is really stressful. Fun, but stressful,” she writes in an e-mail. “We are settling on the china that we’ll be using for the rest of our lives.”

Welcome to the life of engaged Harvard seniors, who, in addition to writing theses, searching for jobs, and spending last-minute time with friends, must also find time to plan their upcoming weddings, decide where they and their future spouses will live, and handle the inevitably surprised reactions from their peers.

Cohen got engaged to her boyfriend of three years, Ari Z. Moskowitz ’06, this December.

“People who know both of us aren’t surprised,” Cohen says. “But for my friends in other extracurriculars it’s more of a shocker. My sense is that underneath the congratulations it’s like, ‘What the hell?’ It’s not something people would say, but it’s there.”

Although the average age at marriage in the U.S. is 25 for women and 27 for men, educated people tend to marry even later, according to Professor of Sociology Martin K. Whyte. That makes the few members of the Class of 2006 who are already engaged a distinct minority—especially at a school like Harvard, where marriage is hardly the first priority for most graduating seniors.

TOO MUCH, TOO FAST?

In an opinion piece published in Fifteen Minutes last spring, Laura H. Owen ’06 expressed surprise and skepticism at discovering someone her age was engaged to be married. “I think the main problem is that uncertainty is scary, and leaving college and going out on your own is scary, too,” she wrote. “It would be nice, upon graduation, to have somebody to go with you, find a crappy apartment with you, open a bank account with you, and spend Saturday night in a strange city with you.”

Lyndsey M. Straight ’06, who got engaged at the beginning of this school year to James E. Kruzer ’04, her boyfriend of three years, disagrees.

“I think it’s really kind of offensive, the attitude that getting married at this age is something people do because they don’t want to be alone,” she says. “At Harvard a lot of women get stuck in the mindset that the reason they don’t want to get married early or become involved in serious relationships is because they think it will interfere with their own ambitions in life. But I think if you are lucky enough, being engaged or married is something that helps encourage those goals.”

Though most of her friends have been congratulatory, Straight says “a couple of people have not been as happy or enthusiastic.”

“I don’t want to judge, and I try not to let it get to me,” she says. “There have been some minor negatives, but on the whole, the reaction has been really positive.”

All five students interviewed for this article say they have faced a few skeptics.

Cohen and Moskowitz, both members of the Orthodox Jewish community, where getting married earlier is more common, have encountered surprise of a somewhat different sort. Many of their friends from high school (both attended Jewish day schools) are already married, even though some have yet to enter their junior year of college.

“We aren’t abiding by the norms of either world,” Cohen says. “There is the Harvard perspective, which is, essentially—you are an empowered Harvard woman, you are going to have a career, use your twenties to do big exciting things and figure out who you are. And the Orthodox perspective is—why did you wait three years before getting engaged? Many get married within a year of dating.”

Moskowitz says that for them, waiting to finish college was the right decision.

“When you get married the assumption is that you are an adult living an adult life; we felt we couldn’t do that unless we were prepared to support ourselves,” he explains. “We also still wanted to have the experience of being in college just like everyone does.”

FAMILY MATTERS

Patrick J. Toussaint ’06 has known his fiancée, Andrea M. Ducas, since the sixth grade. They started dating in their junior year of high school, and in the summer of 2004, when she had just completed her first year at Brown, the two got engaged. “We’d been together for so long and it was just the realization that we were not looking for anybody else to spend our lives with,” Toussaint explains. The couple’s wedding is tentatively scheduled for December.

Though he says his friends were thrilled, his parents were not as pleased. “My parents were like, ‘You should wait, you should put this off and make sure you know what you are doing,’” he says.

But after a while, his parents accepted the marriage. “Having secured a job post-graduation has really helped,” adds Ducas.

For some couples, the encouragement and excitement of their families have made the process less stressful.

“My parents were extremely happy,” Straight says. “They came up here a few weeks after we got engaged to see the ring and visit us. They are very excited for the wedding.”

As for Cohen and Moskowitz, their parents’ choices may have influenced their own.

“My parents went here and got married right after my dad’s graduation,” Cohen writes. “His parents also got married right out of college too; and both sets of parents ended up creating big, happy, close-knit families.”

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

For graduating seniors, the end of the year means saying goodbye to friends and the end of college. But for those who are engaged, the ending is also filled with new beginnings: meeting relatives, planning the wedding, and arranging their new life together.

But the logistical details of the engagement can be overwhelming.

“I’m pretty close to finishing all the major details and am wrapping up the minor details,” Straight says about planning her August wedding. “I still need to pick flowers and finalize invitations, but I’ve had the church and the reception hall since October.”

Other couples are not quite so prepared. Cohen and Moskowitz, who only got engaged over winter break, didn’t expect the engagement to involve so much planning.

“Our parents are chomping at the bit to do the planning,” Cohen says. “But we are both writing theses and looking for jobs so it is pretty tricky balancing these things.”

Even the small amount of preparation they’ve done has been overwhelming. “We were registering [for gifts] when we should have been worrying about our theses,” Moskowitz says.

“It’s already been stressful,” says Ducas. “I have six bridesmaids spread out all over the country going to school, and getting them together to look for dresses and details — it’s crazy.”

Both Ducas and Toussaint abandoned plans to write theses this year, Toussaint in part because of his busy schedule. “He is busy with getting ready for work and the [candidate for Massachusetts Governor] Deval Patrick campaign,” Ducas explains, “and I don’t want to write my thesis.”

BUCKING THE TREND

Straight, Cohen, Moskowitz, Toussaint, and others—a word-of-mouth search found 11 current Harvard seniors who are engaged—do not a trend make. Over the last few decades, people in the United States have started to marry later, according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. The median age at first marriage was 20.8 for women and 23.2 for men in 1970, 23.9 for women and 26.1 for men in 1990, and has increased to 25.3 for women and 27.1 for men in 2003.

These betrothed seniors, however, are not as rare as one might expect. They say there is a higher incidence of early marriage among their peers at other schools. “Sometimes you have to remember that Harvard students are often exceptions to certain rules,” Straight says.

All three couples already have plans for the upcoming year. Straight and Kruzer will stay in Boston, where she will apply to law school and he will continue his third year at Boston College Law School. Moskowitz and Cohen have limited their job searches to Washington, D.C. and Boston, hoping to maximize their chances of getting placed in the same city.

Toussaint and Ducas will move to New Jersey over the summer, where Toussaint will commute to a job at Merrill Lynch in New York City and Ducas will apply to graduate schools in the area.

Still, there’s one thing these soon-to-be-newlyweds aren’t rushing into. All the couples interviewed for this story balk at the idea of having kids.

“We want to figure out our own lives before we can go and figure out theirs,” Moskowitz says. “We want to make sure that we can support ourselves before having kids.”

Straight agrees. “I don’t think I’m going to be having kids for a while,” she says. “Neither of us wants to have kids right away.”

When Ducas thought out loud about starting a family, she sounded less like an engaged fiancée and more like a typical college student.

“I’d like to have kids maybe when I’m 28,” she says. “But when I hear a kid screaming and running around I’m like — maybe when I’m 40.”

—Staff writer Dina Guzovsky can be reached at dguzovsk@fas.harvard.edu.