My big, happy marriage
Life is uncertain. Any given person stands at the centre and flux point of many disparate forces and the net product of those forces could push people and circumstances in an almost infinite number of directions. To resolve the inherent uncertainty of existence, human beings have developed any number of “predictive†theories in an attempt to narrow down the infinite possibilities into a manageable few. Ever since someone looked into a teacup and thought their remnant tea leaves looked like a dancing badger, the art of tasseomancy (reading tea leaves) was born. Tea leaf reading of course is a more genteel version of the Roman habit of ripping the entrails out of an unsuspecting ruminant or fowl in order to tell what tomorrow may hold. The urge to predict is a primitive and universal one amongst humanity and it persists today among groups as diverse as meteorologists, stock market analysts and lion tamers. A recent addition to the predictive pantheon has come from researchers at the University of Denver, who have come up with some ways to predict how happy a marriage will be.
To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers gathered more than 1000 people who were in a relationship but unmarried. They followed those people over a five-year period and in that time around 40 per cent of the participants got married. In each case, the participants had filled out detailed questionnaires and the researchers also assessed the marriages of the people involved. As a result of their analysis they were able to isolate a few variables that point to the likely success, or otherwise, of a marriage.
They found for instance that the size of a wedding related to subsequent marital quality. It emerged that where the wedding included 150 guests or more, 47 per cent of marriages reported high quality. By contrast, when the guest list was less than 50 then only 31 per cent of marriages showed high quality. To show that the relationship between guest numbers and marriage quality was linear, those weddings with less than 149 but more than 50 guests had a 37 per cent rate of high quality marriages. The researchers statistically controlled for income and education status and they theorised that what the size of a guest list reveals is the size of the network of friends and family that the couple have and therefore the support they will have.
Another predictor was the “sliding versus deciding†factor. The results showed that couples who tended to slide into big life changes like having sex, having children, living together and getting engaged (not necessarily in that order) were more likely to have low quality marriages. In contrast, those couples that ritualised the big life changes and made conscious decisions as to what they wanted tended to have happier marriages. So you should be a decider and not a slider.
Perhaps the least surprising finding was that, when it comes to marriage, extra experience in relationships actually does not help. The findings showed that people who had more relationships prior to marriage tended to have lower quality marriages. The researchers think this might be because the more partners you have had in the past, the more critically you will examine your marriage partner in things like sexual expertise, physical attractiveness and communication skills. It may be that lots of previous relationships also tells you something about a person’s personality that suggests they may not be suited to commitment.
None of these factors of course are definitively predictive and if you are looking for reassurance about the prospects of your impending nuptials then maybe that, in itself, is a predictor.
