Not sure how serious you are, but on the chance you are...
The meeting spouse in grade school/not worldly typically implies not leaving the area they grew up in at any point. I grew up in a smallish town where this happens frequently. So many people never leave the state let alone the country. Some people never even left the county. Their biggest travel is for school sporting events.
In otherwords, it's not really a term of endearment as much as another "bless your heart"
Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world? Would it be so bad to be invested in a single community for a lifetime, and to have a deep connection to the people there? I feel like I lack that, deep connections where the pull of cultural influence goes both ways. I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.
> Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world?
For many people, the answer is a pretty definitive yes. I grew up in apartheid South Africa and left mainly to escape two years of compulsory military service helping enforce apartheid rule.
But if you speak to immigrants in any first world country, you'll find lots of similar stories. People having migrated because of severe political or economic issues.
> I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.
I'm sure you realize that going back doesn't take away the years of wandering. You've moved on — in my case, I've spent almost thirty years in different communities, marrying a wife from far away with her own family and community, moving several times, making new friends and losing touch with old ones — and, possibly more importantly, the community I grew up in has moved on as well. You know how Heraclitus said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice?" The community you grow up in is like that; to remain in the same community, you have to stay in it, be carried along with it, and change with it, or when you return, you return to a community changed in ways you have not experienced.
I grew up in a smallish town where this happens frequently. So many people never leave the state let alone the country
So, you're extrapolating your personal experiences and applying them to everyone on the planet.
Many of my family members met their spouses in their home town. They hardly ever leave that town. They might fly to another country for vacation once a decade, but otherwise find complete fulfillment in the place where they live. Several have never even bothered to get a drivers' license, because they never found the need to have one.
By your standard, that makes them unsophisticated. But they're probably not. They live in New York City.
>>You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.