When it comes to marriage, South Carolina is happy hunting grounds for NC men, women

A love triangle of sorts, centered on North Carolina, emerges from the oodles of marriage data that Time.com decided to crunch.

Time analyzed 116 million “interstate marriages” in which the partners were born in different states. The news site compared the most common home states for those spouses to the national average.

People are most likely to marry someone from their own state, Time found. Failing that, they turn to adjacent states.

It probably won’t come as a major surprise that the Carolinas, geographically joined at the hip, are sweet on – or at least familiar with – each other.

North Carolina residents are 7.36 times more likely to marry someone from South Carolina than the national average, Time’s analysis found. South Carolina folks are 7.43 times more likely to marry N.C. spouses.

But look around the rest of the Southeast and matters get a little more interesting.

Virginia, it turns out, is most compatible with North Carolina. Interstate marriages are 4.40 times more common than the national average. West Virginia, which split from the Old Dominion at the start of the Civil War, comes in second.

Regions tend to stick together in marriage, Time found.

Georgia favors out-of-state spouses from Alabama, although both Alabama and Tennessee prefer Mississippi. Florida, with only two adjacent states, picks Georgia over Alabama.

Which, if nothing else, makes college football season more interesting.

This story was originally published May 16, 2017 at 9:50 AM with the headline "When it comes to marriage, South Carolina is happy hunting grounds for NC men, women."