9 ms·

What makes for a stable marriage?

152 points by rhiever 12y ago

vlarson 12y ago
As the co-author of "The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels" (Seal Press, Sept. 28) I find the post and the following comments intriguing. Correlation is not causation, and sociologist Philip Cohen has done a fine job of pointing out the difference with similar findings reported by the National Marriage Project (http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejection-of-the-national-marriage-projects-before-i-do/ http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejectio...). I love what Scott Burson says, "Your marriage will be what you make it." Amen! A marriage license doesn't dictate how you set up your marriage. It doesn't require that the couples live together, have kids or not, be monogamous, etc. That is up to the couple to decide and in truth, we don't all marry for the same reasons. The license grants you more than 1,000 government perks (and why the government gives those out based on a person's love life is a curious thing) and marriage still matters to many of us, otherwise you wouldn't see the push by same-sex couples to be treated equally. Our book offers seven alt models that couples have already chosen to break free of the one-size-fits-all, until death-do-us-part traditional model, which doesn't work anymore. We no longer marry for the same reasons that marriage was created. Time for new models that set up couples for success by how they define success, not just longevity. Please check out what we're doing: http://sealpress.com/books/the-new-i-do/ http://sealpress.com/books/the-new-i-do/
Xcelerate 12y ago
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.
- cryowaffle 12y ago
  >> 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. Marriage are bonded over factors more than love and people in love get divorces. The money aspect of the study is simply showing that the more money a couple has the less likely non-love factors are able to break up a marriage. Seems completely reasonable to me.
- jere 12y ago
  >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? My speculation is that this could be a sign that the couple disagrees on religion and is unable to reconcile it. One partner might attend sporadically, but they're really not committed to it as you said.
thisjepisje 12y ago
Two horses.
stadeschuldt 12y ago
Secret of a stable marriage: Invite 200+ attendees to your wedding while keeping the budget below 1000 USD.
- cm2012 12y ago
  Pretty funny. Potluck wedding?
  - lotharbot 12y ago
    You might be surprised, but it happens pretty regularly. Sure, there are some parts of American culture where you're expected to throw a huge fancy ceremony with a $15,000 dress and a limo and a 7-course meal. But there are parts of American culture where the expected wedding reception is cake and punch, buying a dress on clearance is a mark of pride, and you either drive your own car or borrow a friend's car if yours is well below median crapitude. Our total wedding expenses weren't quite that low -- 200+ people came in at around $4k, including brunch (it was a mid-morning wedding,) a dress hand-made by the mother of the bride, and rental of a horse-drawn Amish buggy from the farmer next door to the church. Of course, both "lots of people at the wedding" and "spend little money" signify something -- lots of people signifies a lot of social support, and friends and family who think this is a good idea; spending little money is an indicator that the important part is the life you're making together, without too much emphasis on the initial celebration. (I have read studies to this effect, though it's been a long time and I couldn't now tell you where they were published.)
  - peatmoss 12y ago
    That would have been brilliant. Just reached the ten year mark on marriage. Our wedding involved a JP and a local park. Food involved some grilling and various sides we made ourselves. We asked for no presents (donations to charity in our names if they insisted). We had a great time prepping everything, but a pot luck...
  - zecho 12y ago
    This is kinda funny. Our reception back home (the wedding itself was an extremely intimate thing with only a dozen attendees partly because it was a destination wedding), had well over 300 people, but I think our costs were only about $2,000 for the whole thing, which included the destination ceremony and plane tickets. My wife and I have close ties to our community, and lots of close friends, and my wife's family is large and tightly knit. Anyway, a big reason our costs ended up so low was because of the size of the wedding. People donated food, services, time, equipment and everything else. If we simply paid for it all, it probably would have cost closer to an average American wedding. With gifts, we ended up making money on the wedding. Not much, but enough to start our younger selves off nicely.
themartorana 12y ago
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.
- smoyer 12y ago
  "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.
  - Xcelerate 12y ago
    > there's not really such a thing as a bad marriage so much as selfish participants Exactly. See, I never worry about myself being selfish, but my biggest fear is that I will get married to someone who just quits caring about me or who "gets bored" (I can't stand that phrase) and leaves me.
    - freditup 12y ago
cm2012 12y ago
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.1741-3737.2003.00444.x/abstract 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.
- carsongross 12y ago
  Note that the previous sexual partner correlation with divorce is for females only. Look away! Look away!
  - rhiever 12y ago
    I was very worried until I noticed that. Damn my young adventurous years!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
FiddlerClamp 12y ago
I wonder how this correlates to gay marriage.
nathan_long 12y ago
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.
- jpp 12y ago
  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.
  - kbutler 12y ago
    The 7 Habits title emphasizes correlation. The actual habits and content of the book is much more causal.
edw519 12y ago
Lots of data, graphs, and interesting thinking, but what sticks out the most: 881 words about "What makes for a stable marriage" and not one of them is "love". This piece demonstrates two of the most common memes that continue to perpetuate hn: 1. correlation != causation 2. academia != real life I wonder if OP is married and how the joys and challenges of maintaining a stable marriage for many years would have affected this post.
- emotionalcode 12y ago
  Of all the things you can objectively measure in the world, I am sure a significant majority would disagree that you can measure love. It is possible to love someone deeply and still separate. The cause of separation might be out of love.
conistonwater 12y ago
Warren Buffett once expressed his opinion on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a9Lx9J8uSs#t=2147 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a9Lx9J8uSs#t=2147 It's actually really good advice for many other things too.
rhiever 12y ago
Here is a rehost of the web page since it went down: https://i.imgur.com/rABtgo9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rABtgo9.jpg
pcunite 12y ago
The book "The Five Love Languages" really helped my marriage.
platz 12y ago
I think the folk who cry "how is this topic relevant to hn" are silent when the topic is interesting to them, and then will speak up if they get bored.
lucb1e 12y ago
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?
- jacinda 12y ago
  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.
  - Natsu 12y ago
    Those pretty much have to be correlates for something, but I wonder what?
digmanwithbigd 12y ago
Where does these datas come from?
jostylr 12y ago
I would suggest that if you want a good and wonderful marriage, then respect is key. Have someone observe the couple and watch the dynamic. I wonder how much of the various graphs could correlate with likelihood of respecting the other. I am surprised by the length to proposal. My opinion is that once you meet someone that really clicks, then it works out quickly and well. I wonder if there is another dynamic that correlates with the religious as well, one that perhaps is more in the vein of arranged marriages, so to speak.
- pinkyand 12y ago
  > My opinion is that once you meet someone that really clicks, then it works out quickly and well. Usually that feeling of "click" passes after 2 years and transforms into a mellower , longer lastin kind of love. So if you stay longer, you see how you both fit together under this new kind of love.
- atomical 12y ago
  The "it just happened naturally" relationship is a bit of a myth. They do things their way; you do things your way. There's so much to be negotiated! But before that happens and a couple lives separately everything is fantastic 24/7!
dschiptsov 12y ago
Ability of each to continuously change/evolve/learn - not to get stuck as some "set in stone" personality, to be always attractive as a "new" personality.
bendtheblock 12y ago
I'm a bit surprised to see the conclusions on this post getting so much love on HN. Let's assume it's tongue in cheek that the author says the best marriage is when "you've been dating at least 3 years before getting engaged, making a combined $125k salary, go to church together regularly, and don’t worry about your partner’s wealth nor looks". All the data says is that those happen to be some attributes of long lasting marriages and not necessarily when combined together. How can we know what about the pressures of a marriage where the the couple can't afford to go away on a Honeymoon? What social pressures could there be on a couple that spend over $20k on a wedding? How can we know about the stigma of ending a religious marriage when you go to church every week and invite 200 people to your wedding? Most importantly - there's zero information about the quality of the marriage... The site is responding intermittently but as rhiever says you can get it here https://i.imgur.com/rABtgo9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rABtgo9.jpg edit: I hate to write so negatively so I'd like to say that it's great that there's so much useful and honest marriage advice on here as a result of this discussion.
tzaman 12y ago
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 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.
jokoon 12y ago
regular sex
xarien 12y ago
Communication.
chaostheory 12y ago
Here's the paper from Emory that the post was based on http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480&utm_content=buffer734c1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer 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?
- analog31 12y ago
  This was puzzling to me too, especially because there was also a correlation with wealth. I'm peripherally involved in the wedding industry, as I play in wedding bands. Granted, I only see the weddings where the couple hires live music (not necessarily expensive). But I get to observe some things about the couple, their guests, and how much they spend. All of this is just my biased anecdotal guess: You don't have 200 friends, so if you've got 200 guests, probably 180 of them are someone else's friends -- distant relatives, business associates of your parents, church members. Perhaps simply being part of a larger network of supportive people helps stabilize your marriage. Especially if you didn't invite them to impress them with your lavish expenditure. It's just my impression, but it seems like the folks who spent 20k, were the ones who were sold a big package, perhaps because they are young and un-confident about their social stature. They're probably spending someone else's money. I have rarely if ever seen anybody spend that much if they're older than 30 or even 25. So it's quite possible that the same marriage will destabilize itself when the partners develop their own independent identities, i.e., "change" to the point where they're no longer compatible. Folks who are more comfortable with their own identity may also be comfortable saying "no" to the dozen or more people who are trying to fleece them as they navigate the wedding industry.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  Well... for starters, you could have the wedding at your local parish church, limiting the expenses of venue rental (and maybe achieving some other economies of scope). If you have an extended network of friends and relatives in the area, they could assist with food preparation instead of hiring caterers. Some guests and relatives may attend the service with their own family and children, bumping the attendance numbers, but skip the reception or send the kids home. Coming in under $100/head should then be easily doable. Of course this pattern is probably well-correlated with the "goes to church regularly" set and may indicate a level of serious commitment to marriage as "'til death do us part", to say nothing of other demographic differentiation.
disallusioned42 12y ago
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.
- genwin 12y ago
  Focus on divorce rate rather than happy marriage rate (I like that term!) describes pretty much every article on what makes a successful marriage.
- doorhammer 12y ago
venomsnake 12y ago
The way I read that graphs - people in upper middle and high class tend to avoid divorce (probably for saving face). It says nothing about stability of the marriage.
Wintamute 12y ago
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 question, why actually bother now? Why not just partner up with the person you love? Create your own private culture of love and respect between each other. How many couples stay in unhappy situations, and raise children in sad/angry environments, because of the stigma of divorce? Seems like this statistical fretting and min-maxing doesn't help that either.
- genwin 12y ago
  There are gov't benefits to being married. For example, when one spouse dies the joint assets don't need to go through probate.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- general_failure 12y ago
  Many of my friends married because of visa restrictions. You cannot bring your girl friend unless married to the US for example.
- dminor 12y ago
  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.
- Periodic 12y ago
  My wife and I are both very secular. We were together for about four years before we decided to get married and then another year before we actually did. There were basically two reasons why we did it. 1. There are obvious legal and financial incentives which lead to our decision to have a legal marriage. You can easily share property, finances, death benefits, etc. Being able to jointly own property without doing a ream of paperwork as well as be on each others insurance was quite useful. After a few years our finances were already very intertwined and both of us had supported the other through periods of unemployment. It had become impossible to separate our personal successes and so we decided to essentially merge our financial and legal entities. Some married couples keep separate bank accounts and maintain a lot of separation, but we did not. Also, a pair of people is far more stable than an individual. As I mentioned we have supported each other through unemployment and I supported my wife when she became ill. From a purely economic and social standpoint our marriage is a way to hedge our risks. I support my wife when she struggles and I know that she will support me if any ill ever befalls me. 2. We wanted to proclaim and strengthen our bond through a marriage ceremony. This was the reason we decided to do a social marriage. We felt that there was value in clearly proclaiming our intent to live together indefinitely in front of our family and friends. The act of clearly stating something out loud to witnesses can have a powerful psychological effect and it forced us to confront any doubts we had and think into the future to decide whether the course we were on was really one we wanted to pursue. Basically, the marriage prevented us from simply coasting into the future and forced us to make a clear and conscious decision about what we were doing and then we reinforced it by announcing that decision publicly. So there are real benefits to having a marriage which are entirely non-religious. I do sometimes wonder about the gender issues and what is biological vs. rational. We do not plan to ever have any children, so our marriage isn't to provide a stable environment for them.
linguafranca 12y ago
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.
- wglb 12y ago
  Oh if it were simply at's really needed is a little common sense None of this really bears out.
vijayboyapati 12y ago
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-recognizing-criticism.html?m=1 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.
linguafranca 12y ago
Anyone else drawn the connection to http://xkcd.com/55/ http://xkcd.com/55/ yet?
MichaelGG 12y ago
I can't help but feel that there must be some other underlying variables and the ones they measured are just reflections. For instance, the culture -- I'd imagine Mormons tend to not get divorced, have lots of attendees without spending a lot of money, and they seem to really be into marriage, so perhaps some of this could reduce to just "be Mormon".
sreitshamer 12y ago
When I told my father I wanted to get married he just asked, "Do you get along?" I think that's the most important question if you're expecting to stay married for the rest of your life. Many of the things cited in TFA are symptoms of not getting along. Also, I recommend always assuming you're the one who's wrong when there's a disagreement. You probably are, and if you're not it still works out better :)
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  "Getting along" is a key aspect of robustness in a relationship: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1021 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1021 Robustness is under-rated in the romantic ideals people are sold (and I do mean "sold"), which emphasize "perfection" under various guises. The romantic ideal is someone who is not just a perfect match for you, but is a unique match for you, not because of your history and shared experiences but because of some supposedly inherent qualities. The robust ideal is someone you get along with, who you agree with on a few fundamentals--which are mostly about attitude--who you've got enough history with to trust and understand and accept, and who you can negotiate with when you disagree. There could be a million people out there like that if the accidents of history were different, and at least half of those properties are in the relationship, not the person. Another way I put this is, "You should marry someone you could go through a divorce with and still love them when you're done." I've seen friends with fragile relationships go through horrific divorces, whereas ones with robust relationships, while still unpleasant, generally still love each other when the dust has settled.
maurits 12y ago
One critical note to "The particularly scary part here is that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is well over $30,000, which doesn’t bode well for the future of American marriages." Since wedding costs are not Gaussian (quick guess exponential), the mean is not very informative. Even misleading.
jjsz 12y ago
For the majority: real integration with the family.
ScottBurson 12y ago
About a decade ago, the gossip on everyone’s lips was that “1/2 of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce.” That factoid was later disproven[0] Whoa, not so fast. If you follow the link, you'll see that it wasn't disproven at all. Rather, the linked article attempts to supplant this statistic with a different one: the fraction of people who get married who ever divorce. The difference between the two statistics comes, of course, from the existence of serial divorcers. It's reasonable to offer a different statistic that filters those people out. But the original statistic is actually correct as stated: about half of all marriages end in divorce. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  An even more cynical view is: 50% of marriages end in divorce, the other 50% end in death. Mazel tov. I just had to post that, one of my favorite quips. I'm in my 20th year of marriage.
billyhoffman 12y ago
Anyone who thinks the number of guest at your wedding is one of the "7 biggest factors" of a successful marriage has either never been married, is unfamiliar with the different between causality and correlation, or both. This article is irritating in its language to the extreme: "What struck me about this study is that it basically laid out what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S. I’ve highlighted 7 of the biggest factors below." No you haven't. You cherry picked 7 metrics and mapped them against divorce rates. "Clearly, this shows us that having a large group of family and friends who support the marriage is critically important to long-term marital stability" No, it "clearly" doesn't show that at all. I could argue instead that it "clearly means" that most people are highly malleable to peer pressure, and don't want to look stupid/ashamed/embarrassed that they can't make their marriage work, so they stay married (Note, I don't think divorce is about an inability to make a marriage "work", I'm simply pointing out a reasonable reaction for married people to have). The "goes to church" factor is also very open to interpretation. Are people with strong united faith more likely to stay together? That is probable. Equally likely are that many faiths frown upon or outright forbid the concept of divorce. As my grandmother told me years ago, "Catholics, Billy, do not get divorced." I appreciate studies that try to collect this information, but these aren't direct factors. They are, at best, secondary metrics that help reveal information about the traits and values of the people getting married. This still valuable, you just need to frame it in the right light. Married after dating for a month? Hmmm, Sounds like people who aren't thinking things through and considering the long term consequences of their actions. Lots of family at a wedding? The bride/groom is probably someone who has lots of experience dealing with people they love, but who can be difficult, and where leaving isn't really an option because they are family. Sounds like a good trait to help resolve the issues that will come up in a marriage. People who aren't superficial about money or looks? Yeah, those are mature people with reasonable expectations in life. Bet they are going to do much better than someone who wants a trophy wife or a gold digger. Really, this is all just absurd to paint these as "factors" in your marriage.
ourmandave 12y ago
Separate bathrooms.
Mz 12y ago
Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people. So this article is conflating elopement with not having wedding guests. They aren't the same thing. I eloped -- got married in secret. No, there were no wedding guests. That does not mean the two things are identical. Though, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elopement_(marriage) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elopement_(marriage) says: To elope, most literally, merely means to run away and to not come back to the point of origination.[1] More specifically, elopement is often used to refer to a marriage conducted in sudden and secretive fashion, usually involving hurried flight away from one's place of residence together with one's beloved with the intention of getting married. Today the term "elopement" is colloquially used for any marriage performed in haste, with a limited public engagement period or without a public engagement period. Some couples elope because they dislike or cannot afford an expensive wedding ceremony, or wish to avoid objections from parents, or religious obligations. Which gives me pause because, on the one hand, I married in secret. On the other hand, I did not actually go anywhere and our circle of mutual friends all knew our intentions to marry for like a year or more beforehand. We did end up divorced but we were married for more than 2 decades and the divorce was amicable. I think it lasted as long as it did and fared as well as it did in part because we handled our marriage as a very private matter. I don't think you will ever get me in front of 200+ people to marry. If I ever remarry, I expect it to be a good marriage that lasts for many years.
basman 12y ago
This is a misleading article in the following sense: the implication is "here are these seven surprising factors that are correlated with successful marriages". Except, in recent decades US divorce rates have bifurcated into two groups — well educated, affluent people who get married later and have lower divorce rates, and less well-off people who have a higher divorce rate. Given this one fact, most of the factors in the article are completely unsurprising. For example, it would be surprising if going on a honeymoon was not correlated positively with a successful marriage given that it is positively correlated with income.
patricklorio 12y ago
That there are no rogue couples.
xtester 12y ago
Despite good intentions, I think the article would be better off with a title like spurious correlations. Please see http://tylervigen.com/ http://tylervigen.com/ for more intriguing, though meaningless correlations.

152 points by rhiever 12y ago

As the co-author of "The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels" (Seal Press, Sept. 28) I find the post and the following comments intriguing. Correlation is not causation, and sociologist Philip Cohen has done a fine job of pointing out the difference with similar findings reported by the National Marriage Project (http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejection-of-the-national-marriage-projects-before-i-do/ http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejectio...). I love what Scott Burson says, "Your marriage will be what you make it." Amen! A marriage license doesn't dictate how you set up your marriage. It doesn't require that the couples live together, have kids or not, be monogamous, etc. That is up to the couple to decide and in truth, we don't all marry for the same reasons. The license grants you more than 1,000 government perks (and why the government gives those out based on a person's love life is a curious thing) and marriage still matters to many of us, otherwise you wouldn't see the push by same-sex couples to be treated equally. Our book offers seven alt models that couples have already chosen to break free of the one-size-fits-all, until death-do-us-part traditional model, which doesn't work anymore. We no longer marry for the same reasons that marriage was created. Time for new models that set up couples for success by how they define success, not just longevity. Please check out what we're doing: http://sealpress.com/books/the-new-i-do/ http://sealpress.com/books/the-new-i-do/

Xcelerate 12y ago

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.

cryowaffle 12y ago
>> 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. Marriage are bonded over factors more than love and people in love get divorces. The money aspect of the study is simply showing that the more money a couple has the less likely non-love factors are able to break up a marriage. Seems completely reasonable to me.
jere 12y ago
>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? My speculation is that this could be a sign that the couple disagrees on religion and is unable to reconcile it. One partner might attend sporadically, but they're really not committed to it as you said.

thisjepisje 12y ago

Two horses.

stadeschuldt 12y ago

Secret of a stable marriage: Invite 200+ attendees to your wedding while keeping the budget below 1000 USD.

cm2012 12y ago
Pretty funny. Potluck wedding?
- lotharbot 12y ago
  You might be surprised, but it happens pretty regularly. Sure, there are some parts of American culture where you're expected to throw a huge fancy ceremony with a $15,000 dress and a limo and a 7-course meal. But there are parts of American culture where the expected wedding reception is cake and punch, buying a dress on clearance is a mark of pride, and you either drive your own car or borrow a friend's car if yours is well below median crapitude. Our total wedding expenses weren't quite that low -- 200+ people came in at around $4k, including brunch (it was a mid-morning wedding,) a dress hand-made by the mother of the bride, and rental of a horse-drawn Amish buggy from the farmer next door to the church. Of course, both "lots of people at the wedding" and "spend little money" signify something -- lots of people signifies a lot of social support, and friends and family who think this is a good idea; spending little money is an indicator that the important part is the life you're making together, without too much emphasis on the initial celebration. (I have read studies to this effect, though it's been a long time and I couldn't now tell you where they were published.)
- peatmoss 12y ago
  That would have been brilliant. Just reached the ten year mark on marriage. Our wedding involved a JP and a local park. Food involved some grilling and various sides we made ourselves. We asked for no presents (donations to charity in our names if they insisted). We had a great time prepping everything, but a pot luck...
- zecho 12y ago
  This is kinda funny. Our reception back home (the wedding itself was an extremely intimate thing with only a dozen attendees partly because it was a destination wedding), had well over 300 people, but I think our costs were only about $2,000 for the whole thing, which included the destination ceremony and plane tickets. My wife and I have close ties to our community, and lots of close friends, and my wife's family is large and tightly knit. Anyway, a big reason our costs ended up so low was because of the size of the wedding. People donated food, services, time, equipment and everything else. If we simply paid for it all, it probably would have cost closer to an average American wedding. With gifts, we ended up making money on the wedding. Not much, but enough to start our younger selves off nicely.

themartorana 12y ago

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.

smoyer 12y ago
"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.
- Xcelerate 12y ago
  > there's not really such a thing as a bad marriage so much as selfish participants Exactly. See, I never worry about myself being selfish, but my biggest fear is that I will get married to someone who just quits caring about me or who "gets bored" (I can't stand that phrase) and leaves me.
  - freditup 12y ago

cm2012 12y ago

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.1741-3737.2003.00444.x/abstract 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.

carsongross 12y ago
Note that the previous sexual partner correlation with divorce is for females only. Look away! Look away!
- rhiever 12y ago
  I was very worried until I noticed that. Damn my young adventurous years!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

FiddlerClamp 12y ago

I wonder how this correlates to gay marriage.

nathan_long 12y ago

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.

jpp 12y ago
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.
- kbutler 12y ago
  The 7 Habits title emphasizes correlation. The actual habits and content of the book is much more causal.

edw519 12y ago

Lots of data, graphs, and interesting thinking, but what sticks out the most: 881 words about "What makes for a stable marriage" and not one of them is "love". This piece demonstrates two of the most common memes that continue to perpetuate hn: 1. correlation != causation 2. academia != real life I wonder if OP is married and how the joys and challenges of maintaining a stable marriage for many years would have affected this post.

emotionalcode 12y ago
Of all the things you can objectively measure in the world, I am sure a significant majority would disagree that you can measure love. It is possible to love someone deeply and still separate. The cause of separation might be out of love.

conistonwater 12y ago

Warren Buffett once expressed his opinion on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a9Lx9J8uSs#t=2147 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a9Lx9J8uSs#t=2147 It's actually really good advice for many other things too.

rhiever 12y ago

Here is a rehost of the web page since it went down: https://i.imgur.com/rABtgo9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rABtgo9.jpg

pcunite 12y ago

The book "The Five Love Languages" really helped my marriage.

platz 12y ago

I think the folk who cry "how is this topic relevant to hn" are silent when the topic is interesting to them, and then will speak up if they get bored.

lucb1e 12y ago

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?

jacinda 12y ago
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.
- Natsu 12y ago
  Those pretty much have to be correlates for something, but I wonder what?

digmanwithbigd 12y ago

Where does these datas come from?

jostylr 12y ago

I would suggest that if you want a good and wonderful marriage, then respect is key. Have someone observe the couple and watch the dynamic. I wonder how much of the various graphs could correlate with likelihood of respecting the other. I am surprised by the length to proposal. My opinion is that once you meet someone that really clicks, then it works out quickly and well. I wonder if there is another dynamic that correlates with the religious as well, one that perhaps is more in the vein of arranged marriages, so to speak.

pinkyand 12y ago
> My opinion is that once you meet someone that really clicks, then it works out quickly and well. Usually that feeling of "click" passes after 2 years and transforms into a mellower , longer lastin kind of love. So if you stay longer, you see how you both fit together under this new kind of love.
atomical 12y ago
The "it just happened naturally" relationship is a bit of a myth. They do things their way; you do things your way. There's so much to be negotiated! But before that happens and a couple lives separately everything is fantastic 24/7!

dschiptsov 12y ago

Ability of each to continuously change/evolve/learn - not to get stuck as some "set in stone" personality, to be always attractive as a "new" personality.

bendtheblock 12y ago

I'm a bit surprised to see the conclusions on this post getting so much love on HN. Let's assume it's tongue in cheek that the author says the best marriage is when "you've been dating at least 3 years before getting engaged, making a combined $125k salary, go to church together regularly, and don’t worry about your partner’s wealth nor looks". All the data says is that those happen to be some attributes of long lasting marriages and not necessarily when combined together. How can we know what about the pressures of a marriage where the the couple can't afford to go away on a Honeymoon? What social pressures could there be on a couple that spend over $20k on a wedding? How can we know about the stigma of ending a religious marriage when you go to church every week and invite 200 people to your wedding? Most importantly - there's zero information about the quality of the marriage... The site is responding intermittently but as rhiever says you can get it here https://i.imgur.com/rABtgo9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rABtgo9.jpg edit: I hate to write so negatively so I'd like to say that it's great that there's so much useful and honest marriage advice on here as a result of this discussion.

tzaman 12y ago

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 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.

jokoon 12y ago

regular sex

xarien 12y ago

Communication.

chaostheory 12y ago

Here's the paper from Emory that the post was based on http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480&utm_content=buffer734c1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer 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?

analog31 12y ago
This was puzzling to me too, especially because there was also a correlation with wealth. I'm peripherally involved in the wedding industry, as I play in wedding bands. Granted, I only see the weddings where the couple hires live music (not necessarily expensive). But I get to observe some things about the couple, their guests, and how much they spend. All of this is just my biased anecdotal guess: You don't have 200 friends, so if you've got 200 guests, probably 180 of them are someone else's friends -- distant relatives, business associates of your parents, church members. Perhaps simply being part of a larger network of supportive people helps stabilize your marriage. Especially if you didn't invite them to impress them with your lavish expenditure. It's just my impression, but it seems like the folks who spent 20k, were the ones who were sold a big package, perhaps because they are young and un-confident about their social stature. They're probably spending someone else's money. I have rarely if ever seen anybody spend that much if they're older than 30 or even 25. So it's quite possible that the same marriage will destabilize itself when the partners develop their own independent identities, i.e., "change" to the point where they're no longer compatible. Folks who are more comfortable with their own identity may also be comfortable saying "no" to the dozen or more people who are trying to fleece them as they navigate the wedding industry.
fennecfoxen 12y ago
Well... for starters, you could have the wedding at your local parish church, limiting the expenses of venue rental (and maybe achieving some other economies of scope). If you have an extended network of friends and relatives in the area, they could assist with food preparation instead of hiring caterers. Some guests and relatives may attend the service with their own family and children, bumping the attendance numbers, but skip the reception or send the kids home. Coming in under $100/head should then be easily doable. Of course this pattern is probably well-correlated with the "goes to church regularly" set and may indicate a level of serious commitment to marriage as "'til death do us part", to say nothing of other demographic differentiation.

disallusioned42 12y ago

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.

genwin 12y ago
Focus on divorce rate rather than happy marriage rate (I like that term!) describes pretty much every article on what makes a successful marriage.
doorhammer 12y ago

venomsnake 12y ago

The way I read that graphs - people in upper middle and high class tend to avoid divorce (probably for saving face). It says nothing about stability of the marriage.

Wintamute 12y ago

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 question, why actually bother now? Why not just partner up with the person you love? Create your own private culture of love and respect between each other. How many couples stay in unhappy situations, and raise children in sad/angry environments, because of the stigma of divorce? Seems like this statistical fretting and min-maxing doesn't help that either.

genwin 12y ago
There are gov't benefits to being married. For example, when one spouse dies the joint assets don't need to go through probate.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
general_failure 12y ago
Many of my friends married because of visa restrictions. You cannot bring your girl friend unless married to the US for example.
dminor 12y ago
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.
Periodic 12y ago
My wife and I are both very secular. We were together for about four years before we decided to get married and then another year before we actually did. There were basically two reasons why we did it. 1. There are obvious legal and financial incentives which lead to our decision to have a legal marriage. You can easily share property, finances, death benefits, etc. Being able to jointly own property without doing a ream of paperwork as well as be on each others insurance was quite useful. After a few years our finances were already very intertwined and both of us had supported the other through periods of unemployment. It had become impossible to separate our personal successes and so we decided to essentially merge our financial and legal entities. Some married couples keep separate bank accounts and maintain a lot of separation, but we did not. Also, a pair of people is far more stable than an individual. As I mentioned we have supported each other through unemployment and I supported my wife when she became ill. From a purely economic and social standpoint our marriage is a way to hedge our risks. I support my wife when she struggles and I know that she will support me if any ill ever befalls me. 2. We wanted to proclaim and strengthen our bond through a marriage ceremony. This was the reason we decided to do a social marriage. We felt that there was value in clearly proclaiming our intent to live together indefinitely in front of our family and friends. The act of clearly stating something out loud to witnesses can have a powerful psychological effect and it forced us to confront any doubts we had and think into the future to decide whether the course we were on was really one we wanted to pursue. Basically, the marriage prevented us from simply coasting into the future and forced us to make a clear and conscious decision about what we were doing and then we reinforced it by announcing that decision publicly. So there are real benefits to having a marriage which are entirely non-religious. I do sometimes wonder about the gender issues and what is biological vs. rational. We do not plan to ever have any children, so our marriage isn't to provide a stable environment for them.

linguafranca 12y ago

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.

wglb 12y ago
Oh if it were simply at's really needed is a little common sense None of this really bears out.

vijayboyapati 12y ago

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-recognizing-criticism.html?m=1 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.

linguafranca 12y ago

Anyone else drawn the connection to http://xkcd.com/55/ http://xkcd.com/55/ yet?

MichaelGG 12y ago

I can't help but feel that there must be some other underlying variables and the ones they measured are just reflections. For instance, the culture -- I'd imagine Mormons tend to not get divorced, have lots of attendees without spending a lot of money, and they seem to really be into marriage, so perhaps some of this could reduce to just "be Mormon".

sreitshamer 12y ago

When I told my father I wanted to get married he just asked, "Do you get along?" I think that's the most important question if you're expecting to stay married for the rest of your life. Many of the things cited in TFA are symptoms of not getting along. Also, I recommend always assuming you're the one who's wrong when there's a disagreement. You probably are, and if you're not it still works out better :)

tjradcliffe 12y ago
"Getting along" is a key aspect of robustness in a relationship: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1021 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1021 Robustness is under-rated in the romantic ideals people are sold (and I do mean "sold"), which emphasize "perfection" under various guises. The romantic ideal is someone who is not just a perfect match for you, but is a unique match for you, not because of your history and shared experiences but because of some supposedly inherent qualities. The robust ideal is someone you get along with, who you agree with on a few fundamentals--which are mostly about attitude--who you've got enough history with to trust and understand and accept, and who you can negotiate with when you disagree. There could be a million people out there like that if the accidents of history were different, and at least half of those properties are in the relationship, not the person. Another way I put this is, "You should marry someone you could go through a divorce with and still love them when you're done." I've seen friends with fragile relationships go through horrific divorces, whereas ones with robust relationships, while still unpleasant, generally still love each other when the dust has settled.

maurits 12y ago

One critical note to "The particularly scary part here is that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is well over $30,000, which doesn’t bode well for the future of American marriages." Since wedding costs are not Gaussian (quick guess exponential), the mean is not very informative. Even misleading.

jjsz 12y ago

For the majority: real integration with the family.

ScottBurson 12y ago

About a decade ago, the gossip on everyone’s lips was that “1/2 of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce.” That factoid was later disproven[0] Whoa, not so fast. If you follow the link, you'll see that it wasn't disproven at all. Rather, the linked article attempts to supplant this statistic with a different one: the fraction of people who get married who ever divorce. The difference between the two statistics comes, of course, from the existence of serial divorcers. It's reasonable to offer a different statistic that filters those people out. But the original statistic is actually correct as stated: about half of all marriages end in divorce. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html

PhantomGremlin 12y ago
An even more cynical view is: 50% of marriages end in divorce, the other 50% end in death. Mazel tov. I just had to post that, one of my favorite quips. I'm in my 20th year of marriage.

billyhoffman 12y ago

Anyone who thinks the number of guest at your wedding is one of the "7 biggest factors" of a successful marriage has either never been married, is unfamiliar with the different between causality and correlation, or both. This article is irritating in its language to the extreme: "What struck me about this study is that it basically laid out what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S. I’ve highlighted 7 of the biggest factors below." No you haven't. You cherry picked 7 metrics and mapped them against divorce rates. "Clearly, this shows us that having a large group of family and friends who support the marriage is critically important to long-term marital stability" No, it "clearly" doesn't show that at all. I could argue instead that it "clearly means" that most people are highly malleable to peer pressure, and don't want to look stupid/ashamed/embarrassed that they can't make their marriage work, so they stay married (Note, I don't think divorce is about an inability to make a marriage "work", I'm simply pointing out a reasonable reaction for married people to have). The "goes to church" factor is also very open to interpretation. Are people with strong united faith more likely to stay together? That is probable. Equally likely are that many faiths frown upon or outright forbid the concept of divorce. As my grandmother told me years ago, "Catholics, Billy, do not get divorced." I appreciate studies that try to collect this information, but these aren't direct factors. They are, at best, secondary metrics that help reveal information about the traits and values of the people getting married. This still valuable, you just need to frame it in the right light. Married after dating for a month? Hmmm, Sounds like people who aren't thinking things through and considering the long term consequences of their actions. Lots of family at a wedding? The bride/groom is probably someone who has lots of experience dealing with people they love, but who can be difficult, and where leaving isn't really an option because they are family. Sounds like a good trait to help resolve the issues that will come up in a marriage. People who aren't superficial about money or looks? Yeah, those are mature people with reasonable expectations in life. Bet they are going to do much better than someone who wants a trophy wife or a gold digger. Really, this is all just absurd to paint these as "factors" in your marriage.

ourmandave 12y ago

Separate bathrooms.

Mz 12y ago

Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people. So this article is conflating elopement with not having wedding guests. They aren't the same thing. I eloped -- got married in secret. No, there were no wedding guests. That does not mean the two things are identical. Though, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elopement_(marriage) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elopement_(marriage) says: To elope, most literally, merely means to run away and to not come back to the point of origination.[1] More specifically, elopement is often used to refer to a marriage conducted in sudden and secretive fashion, usually involving hurried flight away from one's place of residence together with one's beloved with the intention of getting married. Today the term "elopement" is colloquially used for any marriage performed in haste, with a limited public engagement period or without a public engagement period. Some couples elope because they dislike or cannot afford an expensive wedding ceremony, or wish to avoid objections from parents, or religious obligations. Which gives me pause because, on the one hand, I married in secret. On the other hand, I did not actually go anywhere and our circle of mutual friends all knew our intentions to marry for like a year or more beforehand. We did end up divorced but we were married for more than 2 decades and the divorce was amicable. I think it lasted as long as it did and fared as well as it did in part because we handled our marriage as a very private matter. I don't think you will ever get me in front of 200+ people to marry. If I ever remarry, I expect it to be a good marriage that lasts for many years.

basman 12y ago

This is a misleading article in the following sense: the implication is "here are these seven surprising factors that are correlated with successful marriages". Except, in recent decades US divorce rates have bifurcated into two groups — well educated, affluent people who get married later and have lower divorce rates, and less well-off people who have a higher divorce rate. Given this one fact, most of the factors in the article are completely unsurprising. For example, it would be surprising if going on a honeymoon was not correlated positively with a successful marriage given that it is positively correlated with income.

patricklorio 12y ago

That there are no rogue couples.

xtester 12y ago

Despite good intentions, I think the article would be better off with a title like spurious correlations. Please see http://tylervigen.com/ http://tylervigen.com/ for more intriguing, though meaningless correlations.