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At a time when marriage is falling out of favour in New Zealand, a couple in Algies Bay celebrated 72 years of wedded bliss last month.
Peter Wyatt and Loma Fay Harkin met at ages 17 and 15 while travelling on a ferry from Birkenhead to Auckland.
Peter later visited Loma at the children’s clothing store where she worked and asked her out to the pictures.
He lived in Glenfield and would ride his bicycle to Chelsea, near Northcote Point, to pick Loma up and then double back with her to Glenfield. Loma still has a scar from an occasion where they fell off. She recalls Peter’s mother was furious with him.
The couple were engaged in 1948 and then married in Birkenhead in July 1949.
Their two-wheel adventures continued. They bought a motorcycle and would go on road trips throughout the North Island, including once to Wellington.
In the 1970s they had a son and three daughters, and bought a section in Leigh where Peter built a house. They lived in Leigh until recently, when they moved to Amberlea Rest Home in Algies Bay.
Tying the knot
The popularity of marriage has been steadily declining since 1960, according to Statistics New Zealand. Its latest figures – from before the Covid-19 pandemic – recorded 19,000 marriages a year. In 2019, only 10 couples per 1000 people who were eligible to marry did so. This is less than half the rate of 30 years ago and follows a general decline since the peak in 1971. Perhaps a silver lining is that divorce has also continued a downward trend. Twenty years ago, there were 12 divorces per 1000 marriages while in 2019 that figure was down to 8.6. A third of marriages in the 1980s ended in divorce, 20 per cent in the 1990s and 15 per cent in the 2000s. On average, 8075 couples get divorced each year.
