weddings!

New York Times Wedding Announcements, Charted by the Years

Photo: Courtesy photo

To satiate “a lifelong fascination” with the New York Times and a “statistical interest in various marriage problems,” 29-year-old Todd Schneider poured 60,000 Times wedding and engagement announcements into a computer program and invented Wedding Crunchers, an app that charts the changing rates of Times’ wedding words since 1981. Above, the plummeting rate of debutante and Miss Porter’s references.

A Yale engineering graduate who quit a hedge-fund job last year, Schneider lives in Williamsburg and works on tech start-ups, including Rap Genius, where he published an annotated guide to Wedding Crunchers. Among the discoveries: Boarding-school references dropped sharply in the nineties, and 35-year-olds have appeared as frequently as 25-year-olds for close to a decade.

Here are four Weddings Crunchers discoveries the Cut enjoyed:

1. Though met online has been happening for more than a decade, Facebook has vastly outpaced online-dating references.

Photo: Courtesy photo

2. Of the seven reasons I can think of to get married, love held a lead until money briefly overtook it.

Photo: Courtesy photo

3. Teach for America is an increasingly central experience for yuppie young adults.

Photo: Courtesy photo

4. From Schneider’s blog post: “Back in the early Reagan days, you were actually more likely to see a Republican mentioned in the weddings section than a Democrat,” but the Democrats have been surging ever since.

Photo: Courtesy photo

Though Wedding Crunchers’ data suggests that Yale and hedge fund remain desirable attributes for New York weddings, Schneider is single. “Would be lying if I didn’t say that before publishing this I wondered how it would affect my chances,” he told the Cut by e-mail. “But do you think girls are more or less inclined to go out with the guy who overanalyzes the NYT wedding section?” More inclined, I assured him. Everyone loves weddings.

NYT Wedding Announcements, Charted by the Years