The New York Times’ wedding section makes a handy economic indicator.

As with many infatuations, my New York Times Sunday Styles "Weddings and Celebrations" section obsession was for many years both unrequited and mysterious. The announcements of these couplings, replete with biodata and sprinkled with charming meeting stories, held deeper questions. From my home in Canada I asked myself: were these static, blessed figures with the Ivy League degrees symbols of structural inequality and American aristocracy? Or did they merely want to share word of their new bond with their fellows? My struggle with the raw numbers of romance is a lonely one, but it is shared by others who claim to jump straight to the "Week in Review." In 2002, Slate's Timothy Noah called for abolition of the free (but rigorously-fact checked) service, saying the announcements "are simply another example of the 'winner take all' nature of contemporary success, wherein high achievement (or the expectation of high achievement) confers benefits in spheres that ought to be noneconomic." Meanwhile, others join in private celebration, mining the stories for their pathos.

If not requited, I am vindicated. For if you're looking for an economic barometer, don't look to the TED spread, retail spending, or the Dow-turn to Page 16 of the section in your Sunday Times. Men from Wall Street and Madison Avenue are disappearing from the pages of the Gray Lady.

High rollers, and the people who glom onto their gravy train, used to be the bread and butter of the Times' wedding section. Women, just as well-educated, would often be in less lucrative but more interesting careers. Witness this perfect November 2006 matching: a dashing 35-year-old Virginia MBA man, "specializing in the analysis of leveraged buyout transactions" (father: company president), paired with a comely 29-year-old cum laude graduate who runs a coffee company and has a new novel coming out (father and mother: bond broker and nurse). Sometimes even a stern invocation contains a playful wink, as with the acknowledgement in some announcements that "the bridegroom's three previous marriages ended in divorce." Times society news editor Robert Woletz decides which of the announcements (he can receive up to 300 submissions on a summer weekend, and might have room for only a tenth of those), told The Big Money he's looking for "people who have accomplishments that we think our readers would be interested in." But it's also "a draft of the sociology of our times", and the section has kept abreast of interreligious, interracial, and same-sex marriages.

A Big Money search chewed up 15 weeks' worth of New York Times' Sunday wedding sections spanning from October to February of the last three years, 415 matrimonies in all. (Looking at the wedding-heavy summers would've crashed Lexis-Nexis.) Our conclusion: Males in professions especially hit by the crisis simply aren't marrying. Or there aren't as many of them. Or they are choosing other venues in which to proclaim news of their nonbusiness, joint-liability partnerships.

Before you mock this experiment, consider: Even David Brooks, prior to taking an op-ed column inside the paper, did a little wedding compiling in his day. He found in a 1997 sample that just over half of the grooms worked in finance, media or communications. Similarly, in our sample, around half of the grooms getting hitched in 2006-07 and 2007-08 were in finance, real estate, and insurance; media; and affiliated markets and industries like consultancies, luxury goods retail and promotion, and fundraising. As late as Sept. 14, 2008, the Times published the civil-union announcement of a Lehman Bros. assistant VP. Was the groom oblivious, worried, relieved?

The bottom quickly fell out of both markets. From the end of October 2008 to this last weekend, only 36 percent (49 out of 137) of the grooms came from these fields, more than a 14 percentage-point drop. Is that significant? Yes, and it's even statistically significant, near the 99 percent level, a level of statistical confidence greater even than Karl Rove's largest poll (We've done a simple regression analysis; check it out here)