Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. — and one of my best and favorite sources over the years — has concocted a great little quiz about marriage that ran on the New York Times Op-Ed page on Saturday.
I cockily assumed I’d ace the test — after all, I’ve been writing and editing stories about relationships for years — and yet I was stunned to discover that I answered only 50 percent of the true-or-false questions correctly. The answers are surprising and counterintuitive. I don’t want to spoil the fun by discussing them too much here — go take the quiz yourself — but I will say that question No. 13 was my favorite, and I did get it right.
