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What makes for a stable marriage?

randalolson.com

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Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#81

Post by linguafranca »

Funny how we feel the need to do statistics and draw charts to figure out what makes a good marriage, when all that's really needed is a little common sense.

1. Communicate your feelings instead of bottling them up.

2. Be selfless and stop focusing so much on getting your wants and desires, and trust that your needs will be met.

3. Be realistic, expect that you won't always get your way, things will go wrong sometimes, and you just have to do your best.

4. If you make a vow that your marriage is going to be forever, try sticking to that instead of thinking divorce is even an option.

5. Stop focusing so much on pleasure. Even Plato got this one right. Life isn't about maximizing your pleasure and minimizing pain, it's about doing what's right. Obsessing over getting pleasure KILLS marriages. It's what gave men the stereotype of being sex-driven and what gave women the stereotype of lying there in bed just waiting for it to be over.

6. Stop believing the media. They completely get marriage and sex wrong, in every sense, in every place. Turn off your TVs and think for yourselves about what it should look like and be. Sex is a wonderful way to celebrate the most intimate union of your marriage, but it's not this amazing thing everyone should obsess about getting all the time.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#82

Post by Natsu »

jacinda wrote: post #58
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.

Those pretty much have to be correlates for something, but I wonder what?

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#83

Post by dminor »

Wintamute wrote: post #68

Slightly off topic, but I'm genuinely curious why forward-thinking secular people in the west still want to get married. Historically, and still in many parts of the world, its arguably an incredibly sexist tradition that has its roots in religious and patriarchal control. In many ways it has been completely re-defined, at least in the west, and doesn't have any/many of those connotations any more - but it begs the q…

Sounds very logical, but marriage usually carries a great deal of emotional weight with at least one of the people in the relationship.

There are also some legal advantages in case the relationship ends with regards to income, assets, and child custody.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#84

Post by thurn »

chaostheory wrote: post #59

Here's the paper from Emory that the post was based on http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480&u... The only thing that was contradictory was the parts about the wedding. How can you not spend 20k or more when there are 200 or more guests?

Is this 20k+ number in the original data? I might be reading it wrong, but it kind of looks like the opposite correlation is there.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#85

Post by smoyer »

trendroid wrote: post #47
smoyer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we were discussing "religiously motivated" marriages but rather that a shared religion (presumably one that both participants had before the marriage) was an additional social pressure "like" arranged marriages. In any case, I think that social pressure can be a pretty strong force and that it tends to counteract the sort of selfishness that leads to a "bad marriage". Of course bad marriages will statis…

>both participants cared to work a bit. How do we measure whether the amount of caring done was enough or not? Considering it varies based on personalities and other convincing capabilities of a partner, how do we know for sure apart from just getting information from the partners themselves who say that they tried a lot to make it work. Its important to remember that there is lot of suffering involved when one of th…

We don't measure it - I don't see this turning into a scientific study. I'm not suggesting that one party should be subjected to continued suffering when they're bound to a selfish person either. This is a definite down-side to societal pressure.

The other somewhat related topic is abuse victims. Even without societal pressure, they'll often convince themselves they deserve it and stay with their abuser.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#86

Post by linguafranca »

disallusioned42 wrote: post #60

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 d…

From my experience, the happiest marriages are of people who don't just "go" to church, but actually try to "live" their church's teachings in all areas of their lives. Churches usually promote selflessness, sacrifice, honesty, gentleness, and sincere love. So it's a recipe for happiness inside or out of marriage, but especially inside marriage.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#87

Post by jjoonathan »

Xcelerate wrote: post #71
jjoonathan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exi…

> The supposition that it is always possible to learn to love the other person is as ridiculous as the supposition that people are static. No it's not. What do you support that statement with? > Everyone who gets married knows that the possibility of divorce exists and roughly what divorce proceedings entail. > I would wager that very few people are as hot-to-trot as you are on the notion of honor in contract literal…

> Friends of mine that come from family backgrounds with a lot of divorce have the same view that you do.

I come from a family with a history of long, strong marriages. My parents are another success story. They have learned to tolerate each other, and we (my parents, my sister, myself) are all better for it.

What do I base my opinion on?

1. My parents fought on occasion. Screaming matches, passive aggression, shit-talking behind each others backs. It was rare and not nearly enough to threaten the marriage, but it gave me a point of comparison.

2. I had friends whose parents did this constantly. Rather than fighting 5% of the time, they fought 95% of the time. I saw some of it first hand.

3. I had friends whose parents were divorced. It wasn't ideal and it created more than a few miscommunications, but the kids got the attention they needed, they didn't complain about their parents trying to take their anger out on them, and things generally seemed to work out OK.

By "filling in the blanks" in my friend's description of #2 with my own experiences of parental fighting (#1), I believe #2 is a considerably worse state of affairs for all involved than #3.

> projection

Right back at you.

> cheaters, liars project

We are in complete agreement on this point :P

I think we would both agree that there is a "you get out what you put in" effect in marriage. More tolerance and more commitment from either partner greatly increase the strength of the marriage and are generally a good thing. My contentions are that there's a turning point where this stops being true and that contract verbiage is poor at determining this turning point and providing appropriate guidance.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#88

Post by vijayboyapati »

I find studies produced by the Gottman institute far more compelling because they're much more prescriptive. In particular they analyze the "four horsemen" of conflict in a marriage and how these undermine marriage stability: http://www.gottmanblog.com/2013/04/the-four-horsemen-recogni...

The long term presence of these "four horsemen" is a strong predictor of divorce, and the recognition of their presence is a good sign that a marriage needs help.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage?

#89

Post by Periodic »

doorhammer wrote: post #77
disallusioned42 wrote: post #60

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 d…

I think the data is a fascinating point for lively conversation and conjecture as long as you understand that you can only draw so much so much in the way of specific causation from it. I didn't look at the raw data, but it also seems like some of the info might be inherently linked. Eloping might imply you don't regularly attend church, or if you do that you're marrying outside the church consent. Regularly attendin…

It is possible to do these analyses and isolate a single variable regardless of the correlations with other variables. I'm hoping they did this but their methods section does not seem to indicate that they did.

They have a very large variable space (one variable per question) and they want to reduce that to the ones that are actually interesting. Hopefully they did some sort of dimensionality reduction to find the important variables, and I expect a lot of those new dimensions were comprised of many variables, for example, wealth and money spent on wedding are probably correlated.

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