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What makes for a stable marriage?

randalolson.com

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Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#2

Post by Xcelerate »

As someone who only sometimes attends church, I wonder why that has a higher risk of divorce than never attending or always attending. Maybe lack of commitment?

It's sad how much of a difference money makes. Ideally, money would have no bearing on love or marriage. I'd like to think that if I was well-off (or if my spouse was) and then something disastrous happened, that we would still support each other throughout.

Also, the "looks" thing is kind of surprising. Attractiveness is a binary prerequisite for dating (at least for me) but once married it wouldn't matter to me, in terms of keeping the relationship stable. What if one of you gets in an accident and is horribly disfigured or gains or loses a bunch of weight?

Lots of interesting data -- there are many other correlates I'd like to see. How do personality characteristics (BPD, narcissism, extraversion) correlate? How does constancy of morals/values correlate (someone whose values remain the same over many years vs someone who is always changing their values)?

What would be even more intriguing would be to find the subset of the population that describes themselves as having near-perfect, long-lasting marriages and compare those people to the general population. I would really love to see that.

My opinion is that most marriages dissolve when one (or both) people lose the ability (or never had it to begin with) to be empathetic toward the other person.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#5

Post by themartorana »

A couple of subjective thoughts - the only two points that don't jive for me are that spending huge amounts on a wedding significantly increase the likelihood of divorce, while having 200+ people at your wedding severely decreases it. It seems likely to me that the amount of people who attend the wedding is insignificant, but it can be a good indicator of the importance of close family and community of friends.

The only other thought is how church comes in to play. This is a touch of a sore spot, because my parents stayed in a bad marriage for probably a decade longer than necessary due to religious stigma. As it is, my mother still won't acknowledge her divorce to the church because she would be denied certain things that are important to her, personally.

So I'm not sure that religion makes a marriage stronger, it just places a higher degree of shame and stigma on divorce.

But again, these are just my personal observations, from someone happily married for a decade who has a big family, spent less than $10k on a wedding with less than 50 people, and is (and whose partner is) agnostic.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#6

Post by cm2012 »

Another interesting statistic to add to this: divorce risk increases significantly the more sexual partners you've had before marriage: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2003.....

However, cohabitation and sex with your eventual spouse before marriage helps your chances.

This is all correlation, of course.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#8

Post by smoyer »

themartorana wrote: post #5

A couple of subjective thoughts - the only two points that don't jive for me are that spending huge amounts on a wedding significantly increase the likelihood of divorce, while having 200+ people at your wedding severely decreases it. It seems likely to me that the amount of people who attend the wedding is insignificant, but it can be a good indicator of the importance of close family and community of friends. The o…

"So I'm not sure that religion makes a marriage stronger, it just places a higher degree of shame and stigma on divorce."

But perhaps any social pressure that encourages marriage would do the same thing? I've got quite a few friends that have had arranged marriages - they marry strangers and work to build a happy marriage from it because their families expect it.

On the other hand, "staying in a bad marriage" is a misnomer - there's not really such a thing as a bad marriage so much as selfish participants. When one more both of the partners refuse to work towards a better marriage, it's practically impossible to make that marriage last.

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