4 Quaint ideas for a happy marriage that have merit

Monday, September 11, 2023

9 years ago, a research project followed 1,000 Americans over 5 years as over 40% of them married, and created intentional families with children.

The final report from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia (Rhoades & Stanley, 2014), is a pretty solid rebuke of the relationship values promoted by the Boomer generation.

How the study was conducted

• This was a national study based at the University of Denver and funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This was an American study of heterosexual partners.

• Between 2007 and 2008, more than 1,000 Americans who not married, but in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, and between the ages of 18 and 34, were asked to participate in this research project.

• The research sampling was careful, and was adequately representative of unmarried adult humans in the United States in terms of race/ethnicity and income.

• Over the course of the ensuing five years, there were 11 waves of data collection.

• 418 of the study subjects got married. The researchers carefully focused on those 418 new marriages. They collected data on the subjects’ prior romantic experiences, their spouses’ relationship history, as well as a self-report on the quality of their marriages. The final research findings are based on their analysis of these 418 American couples.

• The research followed over 1,000 Americans across five years as they got married, and created new life.

• From the original group, 418 study subjects married. The researchers looked specific features — such as the relationship history, and when they started living together — impacted their marital satisfaction.

Here Are the 4 Main Take-Aways From the Study:

1. Have fewer sexual partners before marriage

The received wisdom from the Boomer Generation was that a multitude of sexual experiences before marriage expands your personal freedom from oppressive social norms.

However, this new research suggests that free love has a social cost. A high body count is problematic. Sometimes science contradicts political correctness. This is one of those times.

• The average number of sexual partners the study subjects reported having before marriage was 5…(I’m sure many of my Boomer readers are smiling faintly and musing ... single digits?)

• But 23% of the study subjects had sex with just one human, and it was these partners who tended to have the highest quality marriages.

• Here is a fascinating data point. For women, the higher their body count before marriage, the less content they were in their marriages.

As one of the study’s authors, Dr. Galena Rhoades, put it:

“In most areas, more experience is better. You’re a better job candidate with more experience, not less.

When it comes to relationship experience, though, we found that having more experience before getting married was associated with lower marital quality.”

The researchers expanded why a high body count corrodes intimacy with a chosen partner:

“More experience may increase one’s awareness of alternative partners.

A strong sense of alternatives is believed to make it harder to maintain commitment to, and satisfaction with, what one already has.”

• The higher the body count for women, the more restless and unfaithful they are in their marriages.

2. Commit and plan to marry …before moving in together

The research demonstrated that humans who either got married before moving in together, or committed to getting married once they did move in together had better marriages. This confirms the findings from a massive study several years ago that I wrote about on the old CTI blog.

This may be because ‘sliding’ instead of deciding can make it difficult to get out of a relationship that isn’t working well enough to remain.

On the other hand, if moving in together is treated as a serious step toward a deeper commitment, the negative impact of mere cohabitation is curbed.

It is better, the study reveals, to undertake cohabitation as a very serious commitment, not a financial convenience. The quality of your intimate friendship can tell you what you need to know,.

3. Invite at least 150 other humans to your wedding

Robert Cialdini wrote about this in his stunning book, Influence… in which he discussed the compelling persuasive power of a public commitment.

• The study subjects who had big, formal weddings, 41% of them achieved a high degree of marital satisfaction. Because they made big, fat, public commitments.

• Among the study subjects who married on the down low, and did not have a large, serious ceremony, only 28% went on to experience marital bliss.

• Even the number of guests at the ceremony was associated with marriage quality, with 150 turning out to be the sweet spot for the number of guests.

4. Have children after getting married

Children often suffer when parents are unmarried. Amongst college-educated couples, only 3% of those who had a child before marriage went on to have a high quality marriage. Wow. Even for social science research, that’s a powerfully obvious pathway to misery.

However, of those who got married before having a child, 44% went on to have high marital satisfaction.

Sliding versus deciding… The peril of sloppy sliding…

The study’s co-author, Professor Scott Stanley, explained that there was too much sliding through traditional relationship transitions these days, without the commitment of an actual limiting decision.

“We believe that one important obstacle to marital happiness is that many people now slide through major relationship transitions — like having sex, moving in together, getting engaged or having a child — that have potentially life-altering consequences.

Another way to think about ‘sliding versus deciding’ is in terms of rituals.

We tend to ritualize experiences that are important.

At times of important transitions, the process of making a decision sets up couples to make stronger commitments with better follow-through as they live them out.”

Final thoughts on a controversial, if not despised piece of research

This was a reasonably large, carefully constructed study undertaken by a wonderful research team at the University of Denver, one of the finest research universities in the USA… but it wasn’t entirely their baby.

The authors state the project was “initially funded” by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, but they also acknowledge additional funding from the William E. Simon Foundation, a very conservative foundation which only recently terminated it’s grant program..

But here’s where culture wars slip into the discussion. The study was met with robust critiques. Phil Cohen’s is perhaps the most thoughtful, and skeptical.

We need healthy skepticism in our national dialogue on marriage quality. But, it’s also sad to see important data obscured by broader intellectual animosity.

The support from the William E. Simon Foundation, a very conservative institution, waved a red flag to liberal academia. Considering some of the foundations dangerous and absurd earlier enthusiasms, it makes sense that the best minds would tear into this report aggressively.

But I saw no massive flaws or dishonesty in the study.

Could some of the metrics have been accounted for differently? Perhaps. But this quibble skirts the larger debate.

• The data point that I found most interesting is that the couples who adhered to these 4 values weren’t slightly happier, there were massively happier. It begs the question… is the correlation with the behaviors? Or underlying traits? And the fact is, we don’t really know.

  The researchers addressed this issue directly:

One obvious objection to this study is that it may be capturing what social scientists call “selection effects” rather than a causal relationship between our independent variables and the outcome at hand.

That is, this report’s results may reflect the fact that certain types of people are more likely to engage in certain behaviors—such as having a child prior to marriage—that are correlated with experiencing lower odds of marital quality.

It could be that these underlying traits or experiences, rather than the behaviors we analyzed, explain the associations reported here. This objection applies to most research that is not based on randomized experiments.

We cannot prove causal associations between the personal and couple factors we explore and marital quality.

So at the end of the day, the Denver researchers are saying your mileage may vary, but they uncovered 4 specific values and traits that embrace and facilitate an intimate life with a high likelihood of relationship satisfaction.

If you’re thinking about your intimate life, please give them careful consideration. Ask each other powerful questions. They might provide you the opportunity to love more abundantly.

What can we do in order to choose a life partner carefully and wisely? Pre-marital counseling can reduce divorce by 30%. I can help with that.

Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.

RESEARCH:

Knopp, K., Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S., Owen, J., & Markman, H. (2014). Fluctuations in commitment over time and relationship outcomes. Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, 3(4), 220–231. https://doi.org/10.1037/cfp0000029