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What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

randalolson.com

31–40 of 79 posts

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#31

I like statistics, but I think here we have personal and cultural factors that make statistics of no sense if you are trying to use probabilities for your personal life. What I think is a key factor in an stable marriage is the ability to communicate, share and enjoy with your partner. I have been more than 20 years married and my wife wonders why our marriage is so much alive, I don't know the secret but we try to e…

Possibly more important than communication is the ability to pick your battles and let go a bone when it's not worth fighting for.

Long term couples invariably survive because the two involved never wanted to divorse at the same time.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#32
post #3

I have great advice howto improve your health and productivity tenfold: DO NOT GET MARRIED! EVER! :-)

This sentiment is common in the brogrammer culture. But from my married perspective, this is only really true if you are a selfish person. Modern individualism has largely morphed into selfishness.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#33
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author addresses this in the comments. He states that there are likely more divorces for one gender than the other in his data set. Which implies to me that individuals, rather than couples, are surveyed about their marriages/divorces. So if he surveyed 10 women and 10 men, those 10 women weren't married to those 10 men. If that isn't the case, then I'm also not sure how that could be the case given that he state…

I believe this is it. From the source paper: "We excluded respondents who had a non-US IP address, reported having a same-sex marriage, reported an age at marriage of less than 13 years old, or were above age 60." The paper used mTurk to get ~3000 responses to their survey. So it's basically saying "the men who answered these questions ended up having this score, the women who answered these questions ended up having…

Apart from the small sample size, if they collected data by mechnical turk then I wonder what sort of biases that introduces? In the paper you linked, Frances and Mialon state:

"Samples of mTurk workers have been found to be more representative of the US population than in-person convenience samples, standard internet samples, and typical college samples"

I am somewhat sceptical of this, and there seems to be some evidence to back-up my scepticism [1][2][3]. In particular, [2] states:

"In sum, the MTurk sample is younger, more male, poorer, and more highly educated than Americans generally. This matches the image of who you might think would be online doing computer tasks for a small amount of money."

Which are some of the factors that the marriage study itself seeks to examine. This looks like lazy data collection methodology to me.

[1] http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/7/10/fooled-twice...

[2] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/19/how-representative-are-a...

[3] http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographi...

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#34

It's a shame the "being the same age" item didn't separate the data for men being older from the data for women being older (for heterosexual marriages). With society being somewhat more accepting of older men marrying younger women rather than the other way around, it would be interesting to see if marriage success agreed with that or not.

It bothers me when folks don't separate the genders when doing analysis like this. Men and women can't be treated as interchangeable; a marriage with an older man is crucially different from one with an older woman, and a marriage with a more educated man from one with a more educated woman.

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#36

I like statistics, but I think here we have personal and cultural factors that make statistics of no sense if you are trying to use probabilities for your personal life. What I think is a key factor in an stable marriage is the ability to communicate, share and enjoy with your partner. I have been more than 20 years married and my wife wonders why our marriage is so much alive, I don't know the secret but we try to e…

Possibly more important than communication is the ability to pick your battles and let go a bone when it's not worth fighting for. Long term couples invariably survive because the two involved never wanted to divorse at the same time.

"Long term couples invariably survive because the two involved never wanted to divorce at the same time"

If I may be allowed a little joke, statistics here are really of little use in order to estimate a conditional probability (i.e, the probability that you (yourself) get divorced). But your sentence, while true, seems to be produced by a excessive rational mind an sounds like a pure truism, anyway, enhancing that truism:

In other not to get divorced, when you want to divorce just let go the bone and wait for the other one to change opinion. You will have a long lasting marriage.

Unfortunately, that theorem doesn't guarantee a happy one. (Sorry HN for the little reddit).

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#37
He didn't address couples counseling and therapy as factors in keeping marriages going. There's always been marriage counseling; today it's a professional therapist you hire, but in the old days it was your priest/rabbi/minister, or perhaps an elder in your household, who advised you on how to get along.

Today in First World industrial societies, couples just try to wing it, moving out from the parents' house as soon as economically possible, living in a tiny nuclear household, sometimes very far away from the parents, and few humble themselves enough to try counseling.

My wife and I have been getting couples counseling on and off since before we were married, and it's helped a lot in learning how to communicate. Those knock-down, drag out fights are today a distant memory and instead we try to focus on communicating our needs, on expressing our feelings in a non-confrontational manner, etc. I'm all for more couples counseling.

Kids help, too. My amateur theory is that fundamentally speaking a couple is supposed to have kids. It's what we were designed to do. Kids are inconvenient and expensive and people mistakenly feel they'll have a happier life without them, but in a certain sense it's an empty life.

Some people probably should not raise kids, but the majority probably should, but also should learn better communication and then they will have a healthier relationship with both their spouse and their children.

Just my humble opinions :)

Re: What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

#39
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is it. From the source paper: "We excluded respondents who had a non-US IP address, reported having a same-sex marriage, reported an age at marriage of less than 13 years old, or were above age 60." The paper used mTurk to get ~3000 responses to their survey. So it's basically saying "the men who answered these questions ended up having this score, the women who answered these questions ended up having…

Apart from the small sample size, if they collected data by mechnical turk then I wonder what sort of biases that introduces? In the paper you linked, Frances and Mialon state: "Samples of mTurk workers have been found to be more representative of the US population than in-person convenience samples, standard internet samples, and typical college samples" I am somewhat sceptical of this, and there seems to be some ev…

It merely says that it's more representative than the other groups, not that it's particularly representative. For instance college samples are massively unrepresentative (younger, smarter, probably wealthier than average).

Essentially it's just a more representative sample than these other horribly unrepresentative samples he's listing.

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