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What makes for a stable marriage?

randalolson.com

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Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#51

Post by freditup »

Xcelerate wrote: post #31
freditup wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be a jerk, but if you never worry about yourself being selfish, there's a good chance you're missing something about yourself. I haven't met a human in all my days who has no unnecessary self-centeredness! Going into a marriage completely confident of your own dedication while questioning your partner's won't end well in my opinion. That being said, I've never met you and have no idea who you are, so don't tak…

Sorry, my phrasing was off there. Kind of tired this morning. What I meant is that I don't worry about myself "getting bored". In other words, I would keep working at a marriage rather than abandon it just because I was tired of it. I'm sure I have selfish moments, but the goal is to minimize how many of them I have!

Ah gothcya, sorry if I came across unnecessarily aggressive or self-righteous. Hope that if you do get married, you and your spouse have such admirable commitment to each other! And I hope the same for myself haha, I'm sure it's one heck of a challenge

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#52

Post by tzaman »

I think that marriage itself is completely irrelevant - it's the relationship that matters; Although we're getting married next year (we joke about sealing the deal, since we both agree it's just a nice-to-have) after 7 years and 4 kids of a relationship. We've had ups and downs which we're all connected to our financial situation. While I was bootstrapping my startup (https://codeable.io), things at some point started to look really bad and we had to borrow money - which brought a lot of stress to the table, which led to a lot of arguments (although I can't say we were anywhere near the breaking point). After we closed our first investment, things got much easier (financially speaking) and I was able to spend more time with my family and bonded with them more. So the pillars of a good relationship are mutual respect and support, lots of love, some financial stability (yes, it matters) and compromises. And spending quality time together, you can't bond if you're not around.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#54

Post by icebraining »

jasonparker wrote: post #37
themartorana wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's not really such a thing as a bad marriage so much as selfish participants This is absurd. It's constructed of a series of suppositions, only a few of which I'll address. First is that people are static. This simply isn't true. We all know that we all change - not just in age, wisdom, and so on, but in tastes, politics, religious dedication, and the lines we draw between wrong and right, just to name a few.…

Gotta disagree with you: marriage is a contract, forsaking all others, so long as you both shall live. Divorce means your word is worthless, and that your own wants are more important than your word. It IS a personal failure, but go ahead, rationalize all you want.

Gotta disagree with you: marriage is a contract, forsaking all others, so long as you both shall live

Not all marriages are presumed to be "for as long as you shall live". Though they don't usually have a set term, civil marriages (at least around here) are not that tied to Christian values anymore.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#56

Post by kbutler »

jpp wrote: post #41
nathan_long wrote: post #17

I wonder how many of these factors are causation vs correlation. My guess is that, for example, that eloping doesn't ruin your marriage and having a big wedding doesn't improve it; it's just that people who elope are reflecting the reality that their attitude is "we're in this alone", and people who have a big wedding are reflecting their confidence and their sense that friends' and families' support is important.

As someone who dabbles in psychology research (mostly Big Five stuff), I had this same reaction: this is great correlation stuff, but I hardly expect it's casual. This is my grip with books like "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" -- picking up those habits won't make you necessarily effective.

The 7 Habits title emphasizes correlation. The actual habits and content of the book is much more causal.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#57

Post by jjoonathan »

Xcelerate wrote: post #45
themartorana wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's not really such a thing as a bad marriage so much as selfish participants This is absurd. It's constructed of a series of suppositions, only a few of which I'll address. First is that people are static. This simply isn't true. We all know that we all change - not just in age, wisdom, and so on, but in tastes, politics, religious dedication, and the lines we draw between wrong and right, just to name a few.…

> series of suppositions ... First is that people are static. I don't know of anyone who believes people are static. You even say yourself in the next sentence "We all know that we all change". No one (at least that I'm aware of) goes into marriage expecting the person they marry to stay the same over time. Another HN poster (can't remember who) put it beautifully once: marriage is an agreement to learn to love the p…

> marriage is an agreement to learn to love the person that each of you become over time

The supposition that it is always possible to learn to love the other person is as ridiculous as the supposition that people are static.

> If both people are in agreement that they might change and get divorced later before the marriage begins, then fine with me.

Everyone who gets married knows that the possibility of divorce exists and roughly what divorce proceedings entail. How does making these details explicit as opposed to implicit help anyone?

> There is a stigma, but it's not on divorce; it's on someone who goes back on their word.

I would wager that very few people are as hot-to-trot as you are on the notion of honor in contract literalism.

> My life is simpler, more enjoyable, and happier if I associate with people who will keep their word at any cost. Maybe your experience is different.

It is. Honesty is valuable, but by my way of reckoning there is little honesty in the practice of enshrining outdated guesses about the future. A promise made without implicit limits is a lie.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#58

Post by jacinda »

lucb1e wrote: post #42

Interesting! I'm confused though: if you have 200+ people attending your wedding, you're over 90 percent less likely to divorce. However if you spend only $1k on the wedding, you're also much less likely to divorce. How does that add up? The most successful marriages somehow have lots of people on a marriage for almost no money at all?

I'd be interested to know if the amount spent on the wedding is the amount the couple personally spent on the wedding or if it's the total amount that was spent on the wedding.

If it's the former, that means couples whose parents paid the full (or most) of the cost of the wedding could fall into the 200+ attendees while personally paying nothing.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#60

Post by disallusioned42 »

This is a fascinating topic to me. I read it with great interest, and I might even go and do a bunch of my own analysis of the data. But I can't help but think that in a way the whole thing deeply misses the point. My skepticism started when I got to the third point: "How often you go to church". The results seem obvious to me. In general, churches frown on divorce, so of course church goers are going to have lower divorce rates! But that's irrelevant if the result is that a bunch of people are miserable because they're staying in marriages that make them unhappy. I used to be a regular church goer and I absolutely saw this. People would stay in miserable marriages because they thought it was the right thing to do.

So I hypothesize that what really matters is not divorce rate, but happy marriage rate. Unfortunately that data is not in this study. And furthermore, if it was, I would suspect significant bias. In the church world that I was a part of there was significant pressure to keep up appearances. So I don't think you would be able to trust either the married persons' self assessment of happiness nor the external assessment of the people who know them.

With this new metric in mind, I went back and re-thought the logic in each of the OP's significant predictors. First stop, "How much money you make". IMO this one falls flat on its face. It's easy to imagine situations where someone would stay in an unhappy marriage just because their partner has money. It's also easy to imagine situations where someone makes a lot of money, but stays in an unhappy marriage because their partner would get half of it in a divorce. Another factor that I think is suspect is "How many people attended the wedding". When a lot of people saw you get married it seems like there might be more pressure to stay in an unhappy marriage to save face to all the people who attended your wedding. I'm a little bit less confident about the reasoning here, but it still seems plausible.

The rest of the predictors seem reasonable to me, especially "How long you were dating". This one stands up under the happiness test and just seems to make sense, provided that the extended dating years were as similar as possible to the married years, minus the marriage license.

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