12 ms·

What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

66 points by redknight666 12y ago

redknight666 12y ago
Part 1 is here: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/10/10/what-makes-for-a-stable-marriage/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/10/10/what-makes-for-a-stabl...
- spindritf 12y ago
  And comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442036
qwerta 12y ago
I have great advice howto improve your health and productivity tenfold: DO NOT GET MARRIED! EVER! :-)
- watty 12y ago
  Both of those things could be improved by marrying the right person.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    survivorship bias much ;)
    - jerf 12y ago
      It's worth pointing out that in the end, all the statistics in the world don't matter to the specific case that you are facing. This isn't a trivial rhetorical flourish; this is actually a profoundly important truth about the world and statistics. You aren't dating/marrying a population... you're dating/marrying a specific member out of that population, and the direction of causality is that the population has the statistical properties it does due to its individual members. Population statistics do not casually drive the attributes of its members.
      - 001sky 12y ago
        This is missing the point. The statistical relevance here is about search costs and stochastic error inherent in attribute selection. Advice to "pick the right lottery ticket numbers" is not a proper strategy to playing the lottery. The lottery by construct is npv negative. The only real-debate is wether or not marriage is a game of chance or one of skill. But distinguishing between the two helps to understand the actual complexity of the situation.
  - drdaeman 12y ago
    I'd say, by meeting and partnering with the right person. IMHO, marriage is just a millennia-old artifact concept where you inform and/or conform with your superior (church, state or whatever) on whom you're going to live with.
- shabda 12y ago
  * Married men are more productive (Or at least earn more): http://econ.ucdenver.edu/public/laura/Class/korenmanneumark.pdf http://econ.ucdenver.edu/public/laura/Class/korenmanneumark.... * married men live longer : http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Health_Watch/2010/July/marriage-and-mens-health http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Healt...
  - qwerta 12y ago
    Correction: married men must earn more & non-divorced men live longer :-)
    - Danieru 12y ago
      Sorry, which study did you cite for this correction? Or are you just proposing a potential confounding variable?
  - jbuss 12y ago
    I didn't read these but the headlines don't surprise me at all. Men who are most productive in their jobs possess characteristics that would seem to make them better "catches" and are more likely to be married. Likewise, men who will live longer are often in better shape and more attractive making them more likely to get married. Nothing about "being married" causes either of these things in my opinion.
- lnanek2 12y ago
  My first wife really didn't provide any benefit and cost a lot, but the second one has been really beneficial for years. Always someone to come home to who helps with the bills, cooking, laundry, not having to waste time going out to clubs or using Tinder because I'm well taken care of at home, etc.. She even got an investor to say yes to funding a startup me and friends are doing recently by talking the investor's native language.
  - aliakhtar 12y ago
    You make it sound like a business arrangement, in which your wife has to provide some 'benefit' or else its not worth it. I can't imagine marrying someone with that type of a relationship.
- explorigin 12y ago
  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.
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  Marriage and love are two very different things. Marriage is a bit like a sticker that you can stick on anything; if you have the thing, you don't need the sticker. So I would say you're correct, maybe even when it comes to relationships. Which, by the way, can also greatly motivate and round out a person (relationships I mean). Productivity isn't everything, we also need things are productive for. That can be being happy alone, but also being happy together.
Steuard 12y ago
These are neat comparisons, in both part 1 and part 2 (especially the strikingly opposite effects of big weddings vs. expensive weddings near the end of part 1). But boy, what I wouldn't give to see error bars on those graphs!
- rhiever 12y ago
  All of the differences highlighted are statistically significant (p < 0.05) in the multivariate model. So there's that. :-) The downside is that the paper only presents probabilities relative to a reference point, but doesn't give raw probabilities.
  - Steuard 12y ago
    Even, say, the difference between "never attend church" and "sometimes attend church" (which evidently makes divorce 10% more likely)? Or how about the difference between household incomes of $85k and $110k (bars differ by 3% out of about 40%)? But I'm glad to know that these are all results with low p-values, anyway: that adds some real confidence to these results. (Though I ought to ask: how many of these significant p-values were between, say, 0.03 and 0.05? How many different correlations were originally considered in the study before they identified these significant ones?)
    - rhiever 12y ago
      Check out the paper (Table 3) for significance statements: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480 Some of the trends in Part 1 are not statistically significant (e.g., "never attend church" vs. "sometimes attend church"), but I presented them regardless because they have a pretty clear trend. I believe p-values are only presented in comparison to the reference point.
      - Steuard 12y ago
        Oh, man, I knew I was cruising for a "it's right there in the paper" response. Well-deserved, I'll admit it: I'm being lazy. But then, that's why I like error bars on my graphs. Thanks for the nicely presented data, regardless!
Bill_Dimm 12y ago
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.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  I noticed that. Anecdotally a lot of older people in successful marriages (10+ years) have the stereotypical "man older than women" configuration (with 3 years older seeming to be common). I'd be interested to see if a marriage is stronger or weaker when the man Vs. women was 1-5 years older. Or if the gender of the older person is irrelevant.
- hammock 12y ago
  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.
- gmarx 12y ago
  I disagree that society is more accepting of older men marrying younger women. There is a different reaction to it, a different set of assumed scenarios, but in my limited experience people accept both until the age difference goes over about a decade.
DontBeADick 12y ago
#hashtagsarestupid
crayola 12y ago
"On the bright side, the longer your marriage lasts, the less likely you are to divorce." Emmm.. Not too surprising, is it? Divorces kind of tend to terminate marriages early.
- drdeadringer 12y ago
  A dark re-twist to the technological adoption of "infant mortality rate". I should stop thinking of such connections.
- ubercore 12y ago
  I believe the point being made here is that for a given couple on a given day, the length of their marriage dictates the probability that they _will_ get divorced. Almost like a hard drive where MTBF increases as the drive is used.
- waqf 12y ago
  It's not surprising, but it's not logically inevitable. Suppose every couple divorced exactly on their 50th anniversary if they were both still alive. Then a couple that has been married 49 years is almost certain to divorce, whereas a newly married couple has a reasonable chance of dying first.
andyjohnson0 12y ago
"It’s particularly interesting to note that the education difference matters more for women than men: Women are 50% more likely to end up divorced when there is an education difference versus men at only 32% more likely." For heterosexual marriages, wouldn't the percentages be the same? If a given number of divorces will always produce a equal number of male and female divorcees. Or is the author saying that the direction of difference is important? Eg, a woman is more likely to divorce her husband if she is more highly educated than him, but not vice versa. Is there some missing information here, or am I being dense?
- ptnapoleon 12y ago
  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 states all marriages examined were heterosexual in nature.
  - bitdev 12y ago
    Perhaps (at least in this data), the women were more likely to have been married multiple times?
  - nck4222 12y ago
    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 a slightly different score" EDIT: Link to paper, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480
    - andyjohnson0 12y ago
barbudorojo 12y ago
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 enjoy together and share ours life. The key factor is real communication. Edited: Grammar.
- ddebernardy 12y ago
  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.
  - barbudorojo 12y ago
    "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).
    - ddebernardy 12y ago
      It goes a little deeper though. The quote about not wanting to divorse at the same time isn't mine and has been attributed to many. Because it's funny, and (reportedly) inherently true for anyone with a decade of wedlock to speak about. The remark on picking your battles, in contrast, is in no way as simplistic as you seem to suggest it is -- pardon if I misunderstood. In essence, psychological studies back that idea, and researchers on the topic are able to predict with relative reliability whether a young couple will survive 5 or 10 years or not. The gist of their criteria, as I understood it anyways, amounts to whether either or both of the two have a giant ego trip or not. So if you want a long-term marriage, which most people do when they say yes, well... learn to give up on what's not so important in retrospect, and pick a partner that does -- or will probably learn to do -- the same. The less fighting, the less likely either of the two wants to divorse. And that gets us back to the first point.
Someone1234 12y ago
If you enjoy this type of thing might I recommend OKCupid's blog "OkTrends." I am married but yet I continue to read OkCupid's blog, just too fascinating: http://blog.okcupid.com/ http://blog.okcupid.com/ Today they have something on race, but if you look at their historical stuff they've looked at tons of other areas, most of which is pretty interesting. As an example of a good one: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woma...
platz 12y ago
Also a good read: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2014/11/06/7-ways-to-have-a-good-marriage/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2014/11/06/7-ways-to-have-a-go...
blisterpeanuts 12y ago
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 :)
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  > (...) in a certain sense it's an empty life. Inappropriately harsh position. A couple unable to conceive can easily have a meaningful life, even without going through the adoption path. It's just that having kids is the beaten path. You know from the onset the path all the way through. It is known what society expects from you and you feel happy fulfilling the expectation. A childless couple must create a journey together. It's a different path for each couple, thus with higher risk. The good news is that higher risk carries higher reward.
  - dasil003 12y ago
    > You know from the onset the path all the way through. Spoken like someone without kids.
- john_b 12y ago
ottorobotto 12y ago
I find that the Gale–Shapley algorithm is generally a good solution to this problem.
shittyanalogy 12y ago
None of these things make for a stable marriage. They are statistics about marriages studied. You don't get to draw the inverse conclusion. And besides just because a marriage doesn't end in divorce doesn't mean it's stable.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  FTA: Of course, it’s important for us to keep in mind that these are all correlations with marriage stability, and they could be telling us any number of things. For example, the “having kids with your spouse” correlation could go either way: Either people in stabler marriages are more likely to have kids in wedlock, or people in less stable (unhappy) marriages tend not to have kids. All of the explanations I wrote above are my own interpretations of the correlations, but keep an open mind when thinking about what could really be driving these correlations with marriage stability.
  - shittyanalogy 12y ago
    That disclaimer is not enough and doesn't justify a link bait title.
mfonda 12y ago
Clicked on this link expecting it to be something about the Stable marriage problem or Gale-Shapley algorithm. Still interesting data though.
PavlovsCat 12y ago
Read Erich Fromm. All of it, or at least the stuff he wrote about psychology and love. If you then feel you still have to add something, go for it. Otherwise, just recommend Erich Fromm and not only will you save everybody time, but also bad advice.
ArtDev 12y ago
For a more in depth analysis check out "The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work", a book based on decades of research at the Seattle "Love Lab". Dr Gottman has written other books, but this is the book on marriage research. http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/dp/0609805797 http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/...
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Gottman is selling just-so stories. His "predictors" aren't actually predictors, but classifiers. In machine learning terms, he gets his amazing results ("can predict which couples will stay together in just five minutes!") only on the training set, which as anyone with machine learning experience knows, is trivially easy: you can get 91% accuracy on training data consisting of random numbers in many cases. Reference: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/can_you_really_predict_the_success_of_a_marriage_in_15_minutes.html http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/can_y...
thyrsus 12y ago
I didn't see this addressed in the comments on Part 1: how is it possible that expensive marriages had more effect on women's divorce rate than it had on men's? For multiple reasons it is not plausible that a strong correlation within lesbian weddings skewed the results. Was the data self-reported, and this reflects imperfect memory of the expense? Were they only looking at the expense from that partner's side of the family?
skywhopper 12y ago
These statistics are interesting, but they are useless for individuals looking for a stable marriage, or couples attempting to foster one. Put simply, the headline is wrong. It implies this is information you can use to make a stable marriage. But all it provides is a summary of traits of existing stable marriages. Knowing those facts is unlikely to contribute to a stable marriage. In fact, if anyone took them seriously as a guide to how to deal with their own marriage situation, they would find these facts only add stress and redirect blame in useless directions: * "We have to have a kid, otherwise the statistics say we'll get divorced!!" * "I guess I should have known better than to marry someone without a Master's degree." Do those attitudes seem like a recipe for success?
- humanrebar 12y ago
  [...] but they are useless for individuals looking for a stable marriage, or couples attempting to foster one. I agree, as does the author if you read the bottom of his post. That being said, I don't see these sorts of facts come up around here in discussions about sociology, childhood development, poverty rates, etc. These facts may not be useful to people in the middle of parenthood or marriage, but they are useful to: * young people that need some raw data to help them figure out what lifestyles might work best * people studying larger trends about society and how people are doing overall It's true that the data doesn't point to a recipe for success, but it's still important to be aware of the data because it's true. Figuring out how it's useful is the next step.
byEngineer 12y ago
Wife has a job too? 75% greater risk that she will be unfaithful; (which is major reason to divorce) Helping your wife at home? 25% less chances of getting sex compared to couple where husbands don't help with dishes and laundry. Pregnant after 30? 10 times greater risk of complications than for women pregnant at 20. Pregnant after 40? 100 times greater risk of complilactions than for women pregnant at 20. Marry to live in debt forever. Work together like crazy to pay off all these debts. Not even seeing your kids anymore. Also husband is a figure to laugh off from Simpsons to whatever is the new drama on TV. Stupid men marry nowadays. Really stupid. Have no wife and kid? Don't you dare to down vote! You have no idea what you are talking about. No wonder America is in decline.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Married, no debt, happy kids. I guess you could do it your way, but we didn't.
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    Divorce rates at 50% (contrary to the statement in the article) are not my way really. This is the way of the society today.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Ha! Divorce rates are because of serial-marriers. The great majority of marriages last a long time; the stat comes from the tail of careless, impulsive people who don't respect the institution. 'Society' doesn't get married; individuals do. You can do it your way, you don't have to care one whit what 'society' does.
      - byEngineer 12y ago
        We are social animals. We shouldn't ignore statistics that show us the society is sick. In my old country (Poland) just 20+ years ago divorces were almost unheard of. Today they are almost as close to the 50% as in the USA. Now stating it is all about individuals and totally ignoring what is wrong with the system, isn't a solution (imho). Why my parents generation with (mostly) stay at home moms and dads working simple manual jobs, got married in early 20s and made happy couples in a rate of 90%+. Why they had 2+ children vs. one that we can afford. I guess that would be very interesting to look at this.

66 points by redknight666 12y ago

Part 1 is here: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/10/10/what-makes-for-a-stable-marriage/ http://www.randalolson.com/2014/10/10/what-makes-for-a-stabl...

spindritf 12y ago
And comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442036

qwerta 12y ago

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

watty 12y ago
Both of those things could be improved by marrying the right person.
- 001sky 12y ago
  survivorship bias much ;)
  - jerf 12y ago
    It's worth pointing out that in the end, all the statistics in the world don't matter to the specific case that you are facing. This isn't a trivial rhetorical flourish; this is actually a profoundly important truth about the world and statistics. You aren't dating/marrying a population... you're dating/marrying a specific member out of that population, and the direction of causality is that the population has the statistical properties it does due to its individual members. Population statistics do not casually drive the attributes of its members.
    - 001sky 12y ago
      This is missing the point. The statistical relevance here is about search costs and stochastic error inherent in attribute selection. Advice to "pick the right lottery ticket numbers" is not a proper strategy to playing the lottery. The lottery by construct is npv negative. The only real-debate is wether or not marriage is a game of chance or one of skill. But distinguishing between the two helps to understand the actual complexity of the situation.
- drdaeman 12y ago
  I'd say, by meeting and partnering with the right person. IMHO, marriage is just a millennia-old artifact concept where you inform and/or conform with your superior (church, state or whatever) on whom you're going to live with.
shabda 12y ago
* Married men are more productive (Or at least earn more): http://econ.ucdenver.edu/public/laura/Class/korenmanneumark.pdf http://econ.ucdenver.edu/public/laura/Class/korenmanneumark.... * married men live longer : http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Health_Watch/2010/July/marriage-and-mens-health http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Healt...
- qwerta 12y ago
  Correction: married men must earn more & non-divorced men live longer :-)
  - Danieru 12y ago
    Sorry, which study did you cite for this correction? Or are you just proposing a potential confounding variable?
- jbuss 12y ago
  I didn't read these but the headlines don't surprise me at all. Men who are most productive in their jobs possess characteristics that would seem to make them better "catches" and are more likely to be married. Likewise, men who will live longer are often in better shape and more attractive making them more likely to get married. Nothing about "being married" causes either of these things in my opinion.
lnanek2 12y ago
My first wife really didn't provide any benefit and cost a lot, but the second one has been really beneficial for years. Always someone to come home to who helps with the bills, cooking, laundry, not having to waste time going out to clubs or using Tinder because I'm well taken care of at home, etc.. She even got an investor to say yes to funding a startup me and friends are doing recently by talking the investor's native language.
- aliakhtar 12y ago
  You make it sound like a business arrangement, in which your wife has to provide some 'benefit' or else its not worth it. I can't imagine marrying someone with that type of a relationship.
explorigin 12y ago
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.
PavlovsCat 12y ago
Marriage and love are two very different things. Marriage is a bit like a sticker that you can stick on anything; if you have the thing, you don't need the sticker. So I would say you're correct, maybe even when it comes to relationships. Which, by the way, can also greatly motivate and round out a person (relationships I mean). Productivity isn't everything, we also need things are productive for. That can be being happy alone, but also being happy together.

Steuard 12y ago

These are neat comparisons, in both part 1 and part 2 (especially the strikingly opposite effects of big weddings vs. expensive weddings near the end of part 1). But boy, what I wouldn't give to see error bars on those graphs!

rhiever 12y ago
All of the differences highlighted are statistically significant (p < 0.05) in the multivariate model. So there's that. :-) The downside is that the paper only presents probabilities relative to a reference point, but doesn't give raw probabilities.
- Steuard 12y ago
  Even, say, the difference between "never attend church" and "sometimes attend church" (which evidently makes divorce 10% more likely)? Or how about the difference between household incomes of $85k and $110k (bars differ by 3% out of about 40%)? But I'm glad to know that these are all results with low p-values, anyway: that adds some real confidence to these results. (Though I ought to ask: how many of these significant p-values were between, say, 0.03 and 0.05? How many different correlations were originally considered in the study before they identified these significant ones?)
  - rhiever 12y ago
    Check out the paper (Table 3) for significance statements: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480 Some of the trends in Part 1 are not statistically significant (e.g., "never attend church" vs. "sometimes attend church"), but I presented them regardless because they have a pretty clear trend. I believe p-values are only presented in comparison to the reference point.
    - Steuard 12y ago
      Oh, man, I knew I was cruising for a "it's right there in the paper" response. Well-deserved, I'll admit it: I'm being lazy. But then, that's why I like error bars on my graphs. Thanks for the nicely presented data, regardless!

Bill_Dimm 12y ago

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.

Someone1234 12y ago
I noticed that. Anecdotally a lot of older people in successful marriages (10+ years) have the stereotypical "man older than women" configuration (with 3 years older seeming to be common). I'd be interested to see if a marriage is stronger or weaker when the man Vs. women was 1-5 years older. Or if the gender of the older person is irrelevant.
hammock 12y ago
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.
gmarx 12y ago
I disagree that society is more accepting of older men marrying younger women. There is a different reaction to it, a different set of assumed scenarios, but in my limited experience people accept both until the age difference goes over about a decade.

DontBeADick 12y ago

#hashtagsarestupid

crayola 12y ago

"On the bright side, the longer your marriage lasts, the less likely you are to divorce." Emmm.. Not too surprising, is it? Divorces kind of tend to terminate marriages early.

drdeadringer 12y ago
A dark re-twist to the technological adoption of "infant mortality rate". I should stop thinking of such connections.
ubercore 12y ago
I believe the point being made here is that for a given couple on a given day, the length of their marriage dictates the probability that they _will_ get divorced. Almost like a hard drive where MTBF increases as the drive is used.
waqf 12y ago
It's not surprising, but it's not logically inevitable. Suppose every couple divorced exactly on their 50th anniversary if they were both still alive. Then a couple that has been married 49 years is almost certain to divorce, whereas a newly married couple has a reasonable chance of dying first.

andyjohnson0 12y ago

"It’s particularly interesting to note that the education difference matters more for women than men: Women are 50% more likely to end up divorced when there is an education difference versus men at only 32% more likely." For heterosexual marriages, wouldn't the percentages be the same? If a given number of divorces will always produce a equal number of male and female divorcees. Or is the author saying that the direction of difference is important? Eg, a woman is more likely to divorce her husband if she is more highly educated than him, but not vice versa. Is there some missing information here, or am I being dense?

ptnapoleon 12y ago
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 states all marriages examined were heterosexual in nature.
- bitdev 12y ago
  Perhaps (at least in this data), the women were more likely to have been married multiple times?
- nck4222 12y ago
  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 a slightly different score" EDIT: Link to paper, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480
  - andyjohnson0 12y ago

barbudorojo 12y ago

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 enjoy together and share ours life. The key factor is real communication. Edited: Grammar.

ddebernardy 12y ago
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.
- barbudorojo 12y ago
  "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).
  - ddebernardy 12y ago
    It goes a little deeper though. The quote about not wanting to divorse at the same time isn't mine and has been attributed to many. Because it's funny, and (reportedly) inherently true for anyone with a decade of wedlock to speak about. The remark on picking your battles, in contrast, is in no way as simplistic as you seem to suggest it is -- pardon if I misunderstood. In essence, psychological studies back that idea, and researchers on the topic are able to predict with relative reliability whether a young couple will survive 5 or 10 years or not. The gist of their criteria, as I understood it anyways, amounts to whether either or both of the two have a giant ego trip or not. So if you want a long-term marriage, which most people do when they say yes, well... learn to give up on what's not so important in retrospect, and pick a partner that does -- or will probably learn to do -- the same. The less fighting, the less likely either of the two wants to divorse. And that gets us back to the first point.

Someone1234 12y ago

If you enjoy this type of thing might I recommend OKCupid's blog "OkTrends." I am married but yet I continue to read OkCupid's blog, just too fascinating: http://blog.okcupid.com/ http://blog.okcupid.com/ Today they have something on race, but if you look at their historical stuff they've looked at tons of other areas, most of which is pretty interesting. As an example of a good one: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woma...

platz 12y ago

Also a good read: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2014/11/06/7-ways-to-have-a-good-marriage/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2014/11/06/7-ways-to-have-a-go...

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

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 :)

sergiosgc 12y ago
> (...) in a certain sense it's an empty life. Inappropriately harsh position. A couple unable to conceive can easily have a meaningful life, even without going through the adoption path. It's just that having kids is the beaten path. You know from the onset the path all the way through. It is known what society expects from you and you feel happy fulfilling the expectation. A childless couple must create a journey together. It's a different path for each couple, thus with higher risk. The good news is that higher risk carries higher reward.
- dasil003 12y ago
  > You know from the onset the path all the way through. Spoken like someone without kids.
john_b 12y ago

ottorobotto 12y ago

I find that the Gale–Shapley algorithm is generally a good solution to this problem.

shittyanalogy 12y ago

None of these things make for a stable marriage. They are statistics about marriages studied. You don't get to draw the inverse conclusion. And besides just because a marriage doesn't end in divorce doesn't mean it's stable.

humanrebar 12y ago
FTA: Of course, it’s important for us to keep in mind that these are all correlations with marriage stability, and they could be telling us any number of things. For example, the “having kids with your spouse” correlation could go either way: Either people in stabler marriages are more likely to have kids in wedlock, or people in less stable (unhappy) marriages tend not to have kids. All of the explanations I wrote above are my own interpretations of the correlations, but keep an open mind when thinking about what could really be driving these correlations with marriage stability.
- shittyanalogy 12y ago
  That disclaimer is not enough and doesn't justify a link bait title.

mfonda 12y ago

Clicked on this link expecting it to be something about the Stable marriage problem or Gale-Shapley algorithm. Still interesting data though.

PavlovsCat 12y ago

Read Erich Fromm. All of it, or at least the stuff he wrote about psychology and love. If you then feel you still have to add something, go for it. Otherwise, just recommend Erich Fromm and not only will you save everybody time, but also bad advice.

ArtDev 12y ago

For a more in depth analysis check out "The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work", a book based on decades of research at the Seattle "Love Lab". Dr Gottman has written other books, but this is the book on marriage research. http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/dp/0609805797 http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Principles-Making-Marriage-Work/...

tjradcliffe 12y ago
Gottman is selling just-so stories. His "predictors" aren't actually predictors, but classifiers. In machine learning terms, he gets his amazing results ("can predict which couples will stay together in just five minutes!") only on the training set, which as anyone with machine learning experience knows, is trivially easy: you can get 91% accuracy on training data consisting of random numbers in many cases. Reference: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/can_you_really_predict_the_success_of_a_marriage_in_15_minutes.html http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/03/can_y...

thyrsus 12y ago

I didn't see this addressed in the comments on Part 1: how is it possible that expensive marriages had more effect on women's divorce rate than it had on men's? For multiple reasons it is not plausible that a strong correlation within lesbian weddings skewed the results. Was the data self-reported, and this reflects imperfect memory of the expense? Were they only looking at the expense from that partner's side of the family?

skywhopper 12y ago

These statistics are interesting, but they are useless for individuals looking for a stable marriage, or couples attempting to foster one. Put simply, the headline is wrong. It implies this is information you can use to make a stable marriage. But all it provides is a summary of traits of existing stable marriages. Knowing those facts is unlikely to contribute to a stable marriage. In fact, if anyone took them seriously as a guide to how to deal with their own marriage situation, they would find these facts only add stress and redirect blame in useless directions: * "We have to have a kid, otherwise the statistics say we'll get divorced!!" * "I guess I should have known better than to marry someone without a Master's degree." Do those attitudes seem like a recipe for success?

humanrebar 12y ago
[...] but they are useless for individuals looking for a stable marriage, or couples attempting to foster one. I agree, as does the author if you read the bottom of his post. That being said, I don't see these sorts of facts come up around here in discussions about sociology, childhood development, poverty rates, etc. These facts may not be useful to people in the middle of parenthood or marriage, but they are useful to: * young people that need some raw data to help them figure out what lifestyles might work best * people studying larger trends about society and how people are doing overall It's true that the data doesn't point to a recipe for success, but it's still important to be aware of the data because it's true. Figuring out how it's useful is the next step.

byEngineer 12y ago

Wife has a job too? 75% greater risk that she will be unfaithful; (which is major reason to divorce) Helping your wife at home? 25% less chances of getting sex compared to couple where husbands don't help with dishes and laundry. Pregnant after 30? 10 times greater risk of complications than for women pregnant at 20. Pregnant after 40? 100 times greater risk of complilactions than for women pregnant at 20. Marry to live in debt forever. Work together like crazy to pay off all these debts. Not even seeing your kids anymore. Also husband is a figure to laugh off from Simpsons to whatever is the new drama on TV. Stupid men marry nowadays. Really stupid. Have no wife and kid? Don't you dare to down vote! You have no idea what you are talking about. No wonder America is in decline.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Married, no debt, happy kids. I guess you could do it your way, but we didn't.
- byEngineer 12y ago
  Divorce rates at 50% (contrary to the statement in the article) are not my way really. This is the way of the society today.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Ha! Divorce rates are because of serial-marriers. The great majority of marriages last a long time; the stat comes from the tail of careless, impulsive people who don't respect the institution. 'Society' doesn't get married; individuals do. You can do it your way, you don't have to care one whit what 'society' does.
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      We are social animals. We shouldn't ignore statistics that show us the society is sick. In my old country (Poland) just 20+ years ago divorces were almost unheard of. Today they are almost as close to the 50% as in the USA. Now stating it is all about individuals and totally ignoring what is wrong with the system, isn't a solution (imho). Why my parents generation with (mostly) stay at home moms and dads working simple manual jobs, got married in early 20s and made happy couples in a rate of 90%+. Why they had 2+ children vs. one that we can afford. I guess that would be very interesting to look at this.