What do premarital experiences have to do with marital quality? (2014)
before-i-do.org
before-i-do.org
Not that I have a better idea - generally chasing down methodological errors if not ought right falsehood is more trouble then it's worth (liars can lie faster then the truth can move) but it makes me edgy when I say it out loud.
This could all be because in this particular case I don't particularly disagree with the premise.
Either way, if you're looking for a long term relationship you should avoid those with high body counts. In some cases causality doesn't matter but you get an indicator either way.
It's not. People who take marriage very seriously (people with traditional values) are less likely to live with people before marriage, so if we select such people we'd naturally expect them to have longer marriages since they value marriage for marriage's sake.
Do any of those strike you as anything but predominantly conservative?
Arkansas 10.70% Oklahoma 10.40% Nevada 10.20% New Mexico 10.20% Kentucky 10.10% Wyoming 10% Delaware 9.40% Utah 9.40% Kansas 9.20%
I'd also like to see the marriage rate by state for comparison, too. Arkansas has more than 2x the marriages per capita of California (lowest divorce rate), for instance, but only 20% fewer divorces...
Again, this article is a bad conceptual and statistical analysis of the data.
By large margins.
Maybe folks have to move to rural areas after a divorce because they’re broke, for instance. Or older people tend to stay in conservative areas, and younger ones move to the cities, and older folks are more likely to be divorced?
And since populations are mobile, maybe they got married in the blue (or red state) then moved and got divorced.
But if someone says ‘Conservatives have fewer divorces’, that really seems implausible considering the data.
People that authentically hold conservative values work differently. I suspect that the lower divorce rate among this cohort has a lot to do with another statistic: that 65-70% of divorces are initiated by women. Conservative values would seem to inhibit a woman from initiating divorce, resulting in a lower rate.
also: this article is poorly thought out junk top to bottom, imo.
The whole ‘abortions for me, not for thee’ situation plays out a lot for instance. And the highest porn use areas have always been conservative from what I can tell.
The article is junk. But the data lines up with other sources I found.
It’s just inconvenient for the narrative.
It also brings up really good coffee table talk, because in the area of ethics, if it's true, an atheist could use this data to rationally conclude that cohabitation before marriage is unethical, and they would be correct in a framework that assumes maximizing human flourishing is a good thing.
> ideals in which Mr. Simon believed – access to an excellent education, promoting strong families, and the importance of faith and patriotism.
IDK, I will always be suspicious or this type of study being done with any ties to religion, since religion usually tends to want people to live separate and in abstinence before marriage. What if they found out that living together and having sex with multiple partners correlated with more happy marriages?
"Premarital sex predicts divorce, but we do not know why."
That last part makes all the difference in the world.
My rejection of the National Marriage Project’s “Before ‘I Do'”: https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/my-rejecti...
I'd be interested if there has been follow up research since.
Suppose I do a study that finds lower household wealth is correlated with time spent gambling in Vegas. Do gambling losses cause the lower wealth? Or is gambling more prevalent among lower income earners?
If my goal is to choose a wealth advisor, maybe it doesn’t matter.
Vegas, regardless of 1000 other variables you might introduce, is a statistically solid system. You are likely to lose money, with the standard of deviation going down the more you gamble.
Low income, education, whatever, don’t change the strong link of gambling to losses.
And this is most definitely a causal effect. Verifiable by mathematics, any study you want to make trying testing counter vailing variables, the teleology that develops as economic systems adapt to create that causality to flourish, and the designs of gambling systems.
So of course the other variables don’t matter to your financial advisor.
—
An exception is games where skill can tip odds in your favor, however slight. Such as poker. A financial advisor isn’t going to second guess a poker player with a long standing career of positive outcomes.
I.e. if A is a reliable predictor of B, it doesn't matter whether A caused B or both A and B are caused by some other factor; A is still a reliable predictor regardless.
it is funny, really how obvious the angle is in these kinds of analysis. There's no way you could even start to draw conclusions from these kinds of data sets unless you already knew what you were going to report -- there's less than no information in the numbers being used... the only rational analysis would result in nothing but questions and absolutely no conclusions.
(RIP Bill Hicks)
>The method for arriving at these “adjusted” (for race, education, etc) percentages is not given.
There is a pretty standard way of doing this: you stratify the sample, then re-weight the subcategories according to their distribution in the population. For example, if your sample had 10% Black people and 15% Hispanic, you would re-weight to 12% and 18%. There are valid criticisms, and then there is objecting for the sake of objecting.
Meanwhile, the original study has its own share of eye-spinners:
>Many in Generation YOLO (you only live once) believe that what happens while you’re young won’t affect your future.
Generation "YOLO" drinks less as teenagers than any generation before them since Prohibition. Generation "YOLO" has less sex in high school.
>There are two other related premarital risk factors for low marital quality in our research sample: Having lived with someone other than a future spouse and/or having been married previously.
The effect shown in the figure is very small. As a rule of thumb, the smaller an effect is, the more likely it can be caused by hidden variables. Smoking causing a 1600% increase in lung cancer rates was probably not hidden variables. A 20% increase in the frequency of "high-quality" marriages could be caused by almost anything.
Following the same logic, there are a few inferences drawn in the study that are likely to be robust: among college-educated adults (but not non-college adults), those who had a child together before marriage were fifteen times less likely to report high marriage quality (Figure 5). Even if we object to the way data were collected and binned, it's hard to put this rabbit back in the hat: it probably means something, even if it isn't causal.
The major weakness of the project is its grandiosity: its assertion that it has identified all sorts of lifestyle factors that can probably lead to a high-quality marriage, and that it can somehow serve as important life advice on these grounds. This drives an excessive optimism about conclusions that, mostly, should be checked again several times before being accepted.
An RCT(randomized controlled trial) is the minimum standard of evidence necessary in this domain to perform a Bayesian update. Unfortunately, and even worse than nutrition, everyone is more tempted to weigh in with anecdotes, conclusions from bias, and arm-chair sociology.
At a minimum conclusions based on correlational studies like this should be disregarded. They're inconclusive at best and re-enforce already concluded preconceptions at worst.
OK sure, I've randomly assigned you to have exactly 15 sexual partners before meeting your spouse at age 30, cohabiting for 3 years without having sex, then getting married with 100-150 guests at the wedding, having a child after 1 year of marriage and a second child 2 years after that. Also I'm going to need you to become Asian and devoutly Jewish, if you're not already.
Please report back in 1-2 decades to let us know how your marriage quality is.
An extremely subjective topic with very controversial areas of discussion.
Rather than being ok with a rather uninformative conclusion though, we often see folks who cannot resist the part of their brain that desires clarity. For many different reasons, the discomfort of not being able to know, justifies reaching conclusions at the expense of them being accurate. So much so, even, that their accuracy is assumed rather than concluded.
This research result doesn't have to prove causality conclusively to be useful.
It is an established fact that higher numbers of premarital partners among women correlate positively with likelihood of their eventually seeking a divorce from their husband. I think it's also been shown that this correlation exists for men as well, though it is not as strong.
This correlation is either causal or it is not. That is to say, (1) more premarital partners for women causes divorce odds to shoot up, or (2) women who have tendencies to have more premarital partners have some other quality that causes them to be more likely to get divorced.
Either way, good advice for a future husband is to avoid marrying a woman who has a lot of premarital partners (provided he wants to avoid being divorced).
The research result is useful for men to think about in spite of its inability to firmly establish causality.
There isn't a special carve out for this topic in the realm of epistemological consistency.
I'd be happy to jump from a plane in the same conditions referenced in the paper.
This is interesting. It's the only factor in the article that only affects one gender. Are there any studies on why this only affects women?
My guess is because woman carry the child. Men do not, so our sexual tendencies differ. Men have the ability (desire, motivation) to inseminate as many as they can. Women need to cohabitate with one to raise the child successfully.
I'll admit, I'm biased about this. My own religion requires couples to participate in a formal marriage preparation program before getting married. My wife and I found that program so beneficial that we volunteered to become presenters after we got married. (Note that although this preparation program was required by my religion, the program itself wasn't primarily focused on the religious aspects of marriage, but on the practical stuff: communication strategies, finances, decisions about children, etc.)
To me, it's a no-brainer that couples who confront these topics before getting married are going to fare better, but I've been surprised at how many of my peers were not interested in any type of marriage prep program when they were planning their own weddings. Perhaps they see marriage as something that's so unique to the couple that outside counsel isn't helpful?
And while I would not be in favor of any state or religious requirement, I still wish it were just more widely done. Call it a marriage mindfulness weekend, make it a social norm as strong as sending "save-the-dates".
It was wild to go to a marriage prep event and see couples right next to us start yelling at each other "what do you mean you want kids?" or "why would I quit my job?" I don't know how you get engaged without knowing these things already.
For us, it led to some really good, deep conversations on what we wanted the future to be like. We were already largely aligned on practical things, but learned even more about some of our deepest dreams. And the style of conversation we practiced is still routinely useful when we get misaligned and need to talk about our hopes before we even start debating some concrete decision.
Put marriage aside, I don't know how couples avoid talking about this in general. I've been with my partner over a decade, not married, and obviously we talked about our feelings about children in the first two years. I don't see how it's possible to have a serious relationship and not do that. The same goes for virtually every other issue. We've had combined finances for most of our relationship now, for example.
If it's awkward or uncomfortable to talk about things like this with your (potential) life partner, that's a feeling it's absolutely vital to work through very early. You don't want to go through life with someone feeling that you can't broach any serious topic.
But there are probably an appreciable number of couples who come to realize that they are not quite as prepared as they would like to be and decide to either extend the engagement process or to focus more attention to working these things out before their vows.
It may be no so much that people bail out due to the process, but that people who go into the process at all are more committed to the idea of marriage being permanent...
There are a lot of lifestyles that don't want or even need that level of planning for marriage.
Some people are just going through the motions blindly either out of guilt, obligation, desperation, or simply because they think their partner is smokin' hot and want to "lock that down". These would generally be less affluent people.
Some others have such strict criteria that they know the planning is pointless if they aren't going to find anyone else. It just has to work and the pressure to make it so is beyond the two of them. Sometimes they also have more than enough resources available that their marriage doesn't need to be built on their own ability to work together or agree on much of anything. These would be very highly affluent people.
Your situation sounds somewhere in between. Not everyone has a life whose success is built on discipline, deliberation, or personal choice.
People also change and making firm decisions upfront is difficult. It's debatable whether they're "not ready for marriage" or if their lives are just so different from the "norm" that it's hard to understand.
I suspect that unless you as a couple are already aligned with a religious provider of this counselling (e.g. the same church), a secular service would likely be more effective. Not inherently, just more a fit with the particular couple.
Which does sort of beg the question about why its not a more common discussed option? I mean, for a couple to seek out pre-marriage counselling outside of a religious context? Or even discuss it as an option.
I've known several couples who did such a program but they were all doing it at the request or insistence of their particular church. And I've known several couples who have gone to (secular) marriage counselling, but only after the fact.
In theory, yes. But it's surprising how little het. cis couples talk about important stuff before getting married. Like, if/how many many, if they wanna live close to parents or move to another country, etc
Is that true? Anecdotally it doesn't seem to be from my circles of friends. At least those I know well enough for that sort of thing to have come up in conversation...
Do you know of any research in the area suggesting it is uncommon?
I definitely suspect what you say correlates to people who get married young, in my experience.
We had a plan for college. We had a plan for work. We had a plan gor marriage, giving birth, raising the kids, and so on. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
I smile now when pregnant couples tell me how they plan to spend their hobby time after the child is born. No worries, I'll be back in art class after a month. My wife says I'll still play golf on Saturdays. Of course we can raise kids in a house with a clean white carpet.
I could tell you it won't be like that (and, if I'm honest, that you won't -want- it to be like that), but you won't believe me.
Pre-marital planning is helpful (full disclosure, I did a class with my wife before we got married) - if for nothing else than giving us confidence we were on the same page. But we covered all the big topics (finance, kids, communication, conflict) which meant we -knew- we were on the same page.
Other people, with other personalities may or may not find it helpful. I can offer you good advice, but I can't make you take it. Experience doesn't work like that.
(For the record, you won't want to go to evening class, you'll want to sleep. And you won't be playing golf 'cause you, or her, will want to sleep. It's truly amazing how high on the priority list getting sleep will get.)
It’s like, people have had religious tradition for thousands of years, and the anti-religion cult thinks they’re the first ones to question the magic fairy tales. Like, maybe there’s a reason for giving everybody a common basis of values to relate to one another, and maybe inclusive secular humanism has repeatedly failed for lack of premise. Maybe wise people got tired of the debate. Nope, sorry, can’t do that; god says no.
Secularism worked for me as an independent person, but failed miserably in any instance of disagreement over values that affect more than one person. Turns out that my personal values weren’t much different than those of any major religion, but wow, I didn’t realize how far off it would be from other people without religion. My guess is that the marriage program would do very little for people not in the religion, aside from possibly identifying a lot of reasons not to get married, one of them being that a lack of strong cultural grounding in values, such as religion, is a starting disadvantage to an already difficult problem.
Not in PA. I've never seen a law that gives preferential treatment to married fathers vs unmarried fathers.
On the other hand, keeping hold of your assets and not assuming your partners debt puts you in a way better position to hire a lawyer and prove to the court that you have the means to provide for them.
> It can be useful for visas if you want to move abroad.
If you are in India and want to marry a US citizen for citizenship, that's a pretty big pro, however women rarely marry "down" like that so it won't apply to most men.
> There are some tax benefits.
Absolutely you can save a few percent on tax, in return for a fifty percent chance you lose half your assets.
The oft-quoted 50% number is also questionable at best, see NYTimes [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-...
Also I’m not going to read a whole book to try to figure out what point you’re trying to make with your link.
Most men don’t fight for custody of their children in divorce. When they do they are almost always successful at getting at least joint custody. See e.g. WaPo [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/myths-about-custody-...
Maybe that used to be the case when divorce laws were written, but today I know very few marriages with the wife in a traditional role like that. The modern marriage has the home workload split equally and very often outsourced. Cleaning services, laundry services and food delivery are accessible and affordable while costing much less than the salary of a full time person doing those tasks and in no way worth paying for with half your assets.
So in a divorce it comes down to earning potential vs spending habits. Earning potential for women is generally less than for men due to their preference for lower paying, humanist fields and their spending habits are generally higher.
That is why divorce proceedings are generally more profitable for women than the accrued assets of the single life.
> Most men don’t fight for custody of their children in divorce. When they do they are almost always successful at getting at least joint custody.
That is just not true. Couldn't read the paywalled Opinion article on WaPo but no judge will remove the mom from the kid's life unless there are very good reasons (drugs etc) but they routinely consider monthly payments from men enough. Unproven allegations of abuse from the wife are often enough to remove the dad from the equation.
About 30% of married mothers don’t work outside the home, according to BLS statistics [1]. You may want to consider the possibility that the sample of people you know is very unrepresentative.
> The modern marriage has the home workload split equally and very often outsourced.
In “egalitarian” marriages where the husband and wife earn about the same amount of money, wives on average spend more than twice as much time on household chores and 40% more time on caregiving, according to Pew [2].
> Couldn't read the paywalled Opinion article on WaPo
It’s easy enough to get around the paywall to read the Opinion article from a law professor who specializes in child custody in divorce, but I guess you’d rather just continue to hold on your persecution complex.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1168961388/pew-earnings-gende...
So the great majority do. That actually confirms my world view. Of course my bubble is not representative, but it turns out that it formed the most probably correct opinion. Good enough for me.
> where the husband and wife earn about the same amount of money
So hard-working women (and they need to be hard-working in order to make as much as men who still have an advantage in the workplace) are also hard working at home. The article says that is only 29% of cases though.
> you’d rather just continue to hold on your persecution complex
You gave me a paywalled article. I gave you a whole free book which you dismissed summarily. Who'd rather hold onto their preconceived ideas then?
I do thank you for the other links, I learned some facts I did not know.
Yeah, because giving someone in a casual online conversation a whole book without even telling them what point they’re supposed to take from it is fucking stupid.
If I had a son, hell no.
Because they want to? I really don't get this attitude of rationalizing everything in terms of pros vs cons. It just teaches people to disregard how they feel
Also interesting that when you give examples of pros and cons, you only give examples of them for you as an individual. If you were to take them for society at large, marriage would be a net positive
I also want to do tons of drugs every night. The reason I don't? A pros vs cops debate happening automatically in my brain. Even if you don't rationalize it, it still happens. And since it's there you may as well use it, even if sometimes ignoring it in the end.
Typo, or deliberate? Either way, it's beautifully apt.
That's a weird way to feel. Think about why you feel that way.
Perhaps, like women who historically were shamed for going outside of a prescribed gender role, you too are falling victim to gender roles that no longer really exist.
So you want to? Good! But maybe go into that a bit. Figure out the "why". This is going to be super important within a marriage when you and your spouse disagree on something. Because then "I want to" isn't going to cut it. You need to explain more and figure out what inferences led to that "wanting to".
Considering why you want the things you want is also worth doing in itself. You might realize that you want them for reasons that are no longer valid, or because someone else wants you to want them, or any number of bad reasons. You might realize that you don't really care about something you thought you wanted.
>If you were to take them for society at large, marriage would be a net positive
Marrying "for society" is probably the dumbest possible reason, even dumber than "because my parents want me to".
How is wanting to make someone else happy a bad reason?
Sure, not everyone has your best intentions in mind. People don't sit around wanting to make scammers happy, normally it's those that they care about
> Unlike child support, which is common when divorcing couple has kids, alimony awards have always been very rare, going from about 25 percent of cases in the 1960s to about 10 percent today, said Judith McMullen, a professor of law at Marquette University. In one study of Wisconsin cases, she found it was only 8.6 percent.
My worry if divorced would be splitting up my retirement savings. Alimony would probably be comparatively cheap.
Still, most people who get divorced probably have nothing to divide and no income to divert to the poorer spouse.
If you look at mid-to-high-income homes, I bet alimony goes up.
CONS OF MARRIAGE
— "Conversation of clever men at clubs
— Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.
— to have the expense & anxiety of children
— perhaps quarelling
— Loss of time.
— cannot read in the Evenings
— fatness & idleness
— Anxiety & responsibility
— less money for books
— "Children — (if it Please God)
— Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,
— object to be beloved & played with.
— better than a dog anyhow.
– Home, & someone to take care of house
— Charms of music & female chit-chat.
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. […] Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps"
I thought there was no need for marriage, then I got married and it has totally been worth it, but not for any of the paper reasons above. Is it possible to have a relationship like mine without being married? I would say it would have to be, because how can a legal contract really improve your relationship that much? However, there’s something in the form of clarity, trust, and bonding that happens when you are married to your husband or wife that won’t be there before and doesn’t show up in pros and cons.
It's sad that getting the government involved in marriage has led to all those adverse incentives, but it's perfectly possible to get married without being married on paper to reduce those risks (although beware of common-law marriage). Since if someone really wants to spend their life with you and is committed to that, what they care about is you making that commitment to them, not ensuring the state will take your stuff and give it to them if you separate.
People with skin in the game behave differently. It’s not an adverse incentive. It’s incentive alignment, it’s the core value proposition of marriage.
If you care enough about someone to tell them you’re committed but not enough to let society actually enforce that commitment then by all means don’t get married.
It's only really the breadwinner commitment that gets enforced, the supported spouse suffers little consequence if they fail to maintain their end of the commitment.
Yep! And I still get half if I run off with the pool boy, so that seems fair.
> It's only really the breadwinner commitment that gets enforced, the supported spouse suffers little consequence if they fail to maintain their end of the commitment.
The “supported” spouse in most cases (especially if there are children) is performing significant amounts of unpaid labor. The fruits of that labor are generally intangible and do not accumulate, so the spouse can’t take them with them in the case of separation. This does not make that labor any less important than the labor of the “breadwinner.” It would be profoundly unjust to allow the “breadwinner” to accumulate and retain all the fruits of their labor, leaving the “supported” spouse with nothing for all their labor.
What if they don't? That isn't actually part of the deal legally speaking, they can just refuse to lift a finger to no consequence.
It's a lot easier to get rid of a layabout when you aren't married. If you get married you probably increase the probability they get lazy beacuse now you've limited your options and they know it.
Many of us are living this hell. It's too expensive to leave the lazy partner, and they know it. So you earn all the money, do 80% of the housework, and raise the children nearly yourself. They watch TikTok and Instagram all day, and your lawyer gives you an estimated price tag of well over a million dollars to escape.
So you make the rational choice to remain in hell until you die, being her personal pack mule forever.
I'm always confused when I see people saying things like this, given what I've seen among my peers.
The benefit to marriage is having children. You've decided to have children, an irreversible decision that will bind you and your partner together forever, cost a six-figure sum, and have a huge impact on your lifestyle and finances. You may have to deal with substantial adversity - perhaps your child will be born with a severe disability - and you'll literally have to wipe someone else's ass. It may cost (you or) your partner her career, or even her life if things go wrong.
Given that, the decision to get married - which is very much reversible, and only costs a four- or low-five-figure sum - is trivial in comparison.
The more experiences, the more one might become addicted to the feelings of first love, which tautologically puts downward pressure on long-term relationships.
This probably account for divorce correlating with more prior partners.
None of them are what I'd call "in love" with each other. They all go through the motions and they all pretty much live separate lives aside from doctor's visits and chores. They've all been miserable together for years.
I'm 40, and it's interesting to me that culture evolved such that younger generations prefer pleasure as a life purpose; and yet younger generations seem to be pretty sad, many still childless and living alone or with their parents well into their 30s. I think this is a serious cultural issue. Pleasure does not give you purpose or long term happiness for that matter. Growing a family does give you purpose.
I am not saying that people shouldn't get divorced, which can be wonderful. People shouldn't feel miserable in their home. But if you divorce 2 or 3 times, maybe it's time to consider that you're to blame and change behavior before it's too late.
Precisely!
This is exactly why the modern dating "culture" has ruined marriage - as in, both existing marriages as well as the tendency to get married in the first place!
And we've also been conditioned to think that love does not require work. That it will "just be". So if there's friction, well, obviously it's not meant to be. Because if it was, we wouldn't have this friction.
But everything is work. Nothing ever ends. We are in a constant state of change. Marriage isn't the end of relationships, it's a commitment to doing the work with someone.
So obviously, I don't subscribe to the school of thought that relationships should be easy. And my frustrations with my partner are sometimes things I need to confront about myself. Things I need to change about how I interact with the world. And of course, there are things they should work on. And things we should work on together.
I think that's part of how kids can cement marriages. Kids are obviously work. Sometimes so much so there's just not enough time or energy to care about the friction that would have collapsed a relationship previously. So you learn to be content with things. And you learn to work at relationships. Because you'll finally meet someone who is way more intractable than you are. Because you can't really punt a kid to the street. You have to make this work.