Residential Propinquity as a Factor in Marriage Selection

Five thousand consecutive marriage licenses, in which one or both applicants were residents of Philadelphia, were tabulated according to distance between the residences of the couples. One-third of all the couples lived within five or less blocks of each other, and the percentage of marriages decreased steadily and markedly as the distance between residences of the contracting parties increased. The extent to which the role of residential propinquity is confined to social areas in which specific attributes or combinations of attributes are concentrated will be considered in the series of projects of which this was the initial step.