If there's anything that can bridge the gap between young professionals new to the District and native Washingtonians, it could be this: None of us like being married.

Maryland is a little below the national average, at 50 percent, while Virginia is a little higher, at 54 percent, and both are declining. But in the District, which experienced an influx of young adults over the past decade, only one in four adults is married while more than half have never wed.

The statistics offer a snapshot in time, and do not mean the unmarried will remain that way. They are a byproduct of a steady increase in the median age when people first marry, now at an all-time high of older than 26 for women and almost 29 for men.

“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to get married someday,” said Kate Shorr, 30, a lawyer and lobbyist who until recently wrote a blog about her social life in Washington, A Single Girl Doing Single Things. “All of us want to meet that special person and marry, but there’s no real rush to do that. Especially in the career-driven society we have here. You don’t move to Washington, D.C., to get married, you move here for your career.”

The Post notes folks of all incomes and ethnicities are eschewing marriage. Of course, one difference is that most college graduates eventually do get married—stabilizing their families, increasing income, and solidifying their place in the middle class.

Photo by dccraftaholic128 via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

Their marriage violated Virginia laws designed to prevent "the corruption of blood" and "a mongrel breed of citizens,” as stated in the 1955 Virginia case Naim v. Naim.

Caroline County Circuit Court Judge Leon M. Bazile sentenced the Lovings to a year in prison, with the option of having that jail term suspended if they both left the state for 25 years. Bazile wrote in his opinion: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

The Lovings chose banishment over jail time and moved back to the District. As profiled in the new documentary, The Loving Story, the rural couple's time in urban D.C. was not a happy one. Fed up and put out, they filed suit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. Nearly a decade later, on June 12, 1967, their case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The state of Virginia argued that its law complied with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, because it could be applied equally to all races. (The clause prohibits states to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.") The Old Dominion was not alone; at the time, 15 other states, mostly in the South, prohibited interracial marriages.

The court ruled unanimously in the Lovings' favor, deeming the Virginia law and others like it unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in his opinion: "The freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides within the individual and cannot be infringed on by the State."

In Mildred Jeter Loving’s 2008 obituary, The Washington Post wrote that she had once said: "The preacher at my church classified me with Rosa Parks. I don't feel like that. Not at all. What happened, we really didn't intend for it to happen. What we wanted, we wanted to come home."

Loving v. Virginia became a landmark case, and these days, one that often comes up in the ongoing debate over same-sex marriage. On June 12, people across the country celebrate the informal holiday, appropriately named “Loving Day,” in honor of the court’s decision to erase one of the last lines of segregation. Today, one in seven new marriages are interracial or interethnic, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest census data. Thanks to the trailblazing couple's wedding in D.C., this year marks the country’s 44th anniversary of the legalization of interracial marriages.

Photo by Flickr user Nathan Laurell using an Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license

“The return is invalid because it has come to the attention of the court that the subject contracting parties to the marriage and you, the officiant, did not all personally participate in a marriage ceremony performed within the jurisdictional and territorial limits of the District of Columbia,” the letter read.

After receiving the letter, the couple looked into legal options to challenge the decision, Alexander-Reid said. They were told they didn't have a strong case and will try to fly back to D.C. this weekend to be legally married.

The full letter:

Perhaps the most explosive New York Times Magazine cover story in history has been burning a hole in my kitchen table for the past few days. It's written by San Francisco-based writer Elizabeth Weil, and the topic is how she and her husband Daniel Duane, attempted to work on their marriage, via therapy, communication, love and attention, etc.

The nut sentence of the piece speaks of Dan's resistance to exploring the inner workings of their marriage with an eye toward improving it. Writes Elizabeth, "He met my ocean analogy with the veiled threat of California ranch-hand wisdom: if you’re going to poke around the bushes, you’d best be prepared to scare out some snakes."

Let's get right to the slimiest snake in the piece. In therapy, the couple discussed what Weil terms "well-rehearsed gripes." In that group falls this: "The time Dan proposed a trade: he would clean up more, he swore he would, if I would just French-kiss him spontaneously once a day; I gave up first."

Talk about a doozy. If I ever found myself insisting on such a trade, you can bet I'd be in favor of some outside assistance with the ol' marriage. The post-game breakdown on this shocker of a passage goes as follows:

Point No. 1: These people are either really honest and open and courageous, or they're channeling their inner reality-TV personas toward a lucrative book contract. ("Duh" Update 4:53: She's already working on a book.)

Point No. 2: This whole French-kissing thing had been a longstanding problem for the couple. Elizabeth writes that the discussion of the French-kissing deal dredged up bad memories of how Dan had made critical comments about her kissing prior to their engagement. Which leads us to:

Point No. 3: If you can get past the kissing problem, you can get past anything. Think about it: Incompatibility on the kissing front is something that two individuals discover before just about anything else. It's a first-date staple. You kiss at the doorstep, or in the car, or in the computer lounge, or on Twitter. And if it doesn't go well, then it's tough to sked that second date. Far more trivial matters have derailed a budding romance. Yet this guy has lived through years and years of un-intrusive kissing! And this woman has lived through years and years of intrusive kissing! Consider how this clash plays itself out in practice. Dan is going for it, pushing....well, actually, no, I don't want to consider it.

Yet! Yet! I can't get beyond this kissing problem. Each time I pick up the story, I re-read the part about the French-kissing bribe. And then I pick it up again, and I re-read the part about the French-kissing bribe. I have no interest in knowing anything more about this couple, unless there's a resolution to this kissing crisis.

What could the Sexist possibly have to say about this?

At first I wasn't so sure that you had recently gotten married. But then I noticed that you had changed your last name to a completely different last name. "Hmm," I thought. "That's weird." A quick perusal of your photo gallery didn't help clear up the matter. Why do you appear to be leaning against an abandoned but polished vintage car at the edge of a wooded marsh, your left hand posed strangely in the air, as some dude stares intently into your face? And to think: In all that time that you were sitting three or more rows behind me in Freshman Biology, you never once mentioned your interest in doubles rustic portraiture.

But then I saw that series of photographs of you swathed in a huge, flowing, white satin dress, some dude staring intently into your face. At that point, I was sooooo on to you!

Your autobiographical section only helped heighten my suspicion that you had recently gotten married:

Website: http://www.[some dude]and[girl who sat three or more rows behind me in Freshman Biology]swedding.com

Interests: Enjoying my wonderful husband!, Trying to talk [some dude] into my design ideas for our home.

I must admit that I became a bit confused when I reached the "Favorites Book" section, where you include "Anything by bell hooks and Gloria Steinem." Hmm. Anything?

Thanks for clearing it all up:

Relationship Status: Married.

Don't Care,

Amanda Hess