Yoffe speaks of the easy comfort and calm many quick-to-marry couples experience, what some refer to as “being home,” absent the common “Will he call me?” dating angst. “We were able to read one another and realize we’re not on first-date best behaviour. We got each other’s jokes. I felt he got me, I got him.” Six weeks later, standing in the dairy section of a Washington supermarket, they decided to marry. “For us there was a rush,” she says. “We wanted to try to have kids. The clock was ticking.” Today, the couple are the happily married parents of a 13-year-old daughter.
Older couples often know what they need from a partner, says Tessina, which can help them figure out more quickly if their relationship will succeed, though not always: “Some just repeat the same old mistakes.” What counts more, she says, is “emotional maturity.”
Yet having the clock ticking literally can spur couples on, as was the case with 61-year- old Shirley Griff, a real estate agent in Thorold, Ont., who married Bill Coates, also 61, in November 2007, six months to the day after they met through an online dating site. Griff’s 30-year marriage ended in 2002. Coates, a professional stamp collector, was divorced after a 24-year marriage. They met for lunch at one o’clock. Griff recalls tearing herself away at 4:15 for a 4:30 appointment. “We just spent so much time together and have so much in common,” she says. “We’re two days apart in age. We’re both Pisces.” His devotion to his mother impressed her: “To me that’s a sign he’s going to be appreciative of you as well.” He also clicked with her two adult children, who teased her about the suddenness of the wedding, she says, which in part was spurred by their desire that Coates’s 92-year-old mother be there: “My daughter asked me: ‘Are you pregnant, Mom?’ ”
Waiting didn’t make sense, Griff says. “It didn’t seem it would prove anything to us, like it would be any different.”
Such is the logic from inside the whirlwind courtship. Outside it’s another matter. Asked what he’d say to his children if they announced they were marrying someone they had known for a matter of weeks, the happily married David Peterson is adamant: “I’d tell them they were crazy.”
