What makes for a stable marriage?
randalolson.com
randalolson.com
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.
I didn't look at the raw data, but it also seems like some of the info might be inherently linked. Eloping might imply you don't regularly attend church, or if you do that you're marrying outside the church consent. Regularly attending church can bring with it a relatively stable set of defaults to invite to a wedding. A large attendee list also might imply affluence, or having taken longer to plan the wedding, implying a longer pre-marriage relationship. All just flippant conjecture, of course, but interesting.
I wonder if there's anything in the data you could use as a sort of halfway proxy for whatever you'd consider a 'happy' or contented relationship.
I grew up in a church environment as well, and I saw my share of marriages held together by social pressure, but I also wonder if some of the other marriages are better because a lot of people I knew very much had the idea that "this is forever, so I don't even have to think about it anymore." It wasn't even a point of consideration anymore. I wonder if that can relieve some level of psychological stress in a marriage that's not absolute Perfect, but pretty decent, instead of wondering if you missed some distorted version of "the one". (again more conjecture)
They have a very large variable space (one variable per question) and they want to reduce that to the ones that are actually interesting. Hopefully they did some sort of dimensionality reduction to find the important variables, and I expect a lot of those new dimensions were comprised of many variables, for example, wealth and money spent on wedding are probably correlated.
Social supports smooth out money problems, health problems, and relationship problems. Money+health problems are the number one cause of divorce in America (that is, money discussions are the number one marriage stressor in the US, and health problems are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US). If your parents/church/friends/cousins can help out with a loan/childcare/outright monetary gifts when certain economic or health sh&t goes down, your marriage is more likely to survive. That's not even counting emotional support and feelings-conversations.
I think that it's not a problem of a specific religion. Most religion has peaceful periods but 300 years later the "same" religion has a violent period and 300 year later the "same" religion is peaceful again, ...
And sometimes, some members of the same church are peaceful and some are violent. It's more complicated.
(Obviously, your point is important in a larger context. :)
I think a big thing that commitment devices (religion, family ...) help with is that when the going gets touch for a little while, you stay together, which is usually good in the long run.
If your marriage sucks for several years, or if there's abuse, then breaking it may be OK; but many of the issues you discard would also signal people not committed, and marriages breaking because they suck for a couple of months.
It depends on what you think is the purpose of marriage. The traditional view you're questioning is that marriage is a very serious contract that is never to be broken (usually with a few exceptions, like infidelity or abuse). I suspect this view is historically an economic device for raising children: the woman raises children while the man provides for the family (please note, I'm making no normative argument for these roles). Monogamy is obviously historically useful for ensuring paternity, and there's obvious selective pressure for that norm to arise (although I've seen studies claiming that humans have always tended to practice punctuated monogamy).
These days, that view of marriage is less vital in the Western world (at least the economic part), but it still has a lot of cultural momentum. Aside from that, the only modern purpose of official marriage is legal benefits: taxes, wills, medical discretion, child custody, etc. Apart from those, I see little difference in a "marriage" and simple long-term cohabitation other than the notion that the former is a life-long commitment.
In short, in Quebec today, less than half of kids born are from non-married parents. Marriage is seen by many as irrelevant, bureaucratic, peer-pressure consumerist obligation. According to QC civil law, once a couple has a kid, they have the same legal obligations to the kid as a married couple (i.e. contributing to supporting the kid in a way proportional to their revenue/salary). As the tacky government slogans like to remind us.. "in a couple one day, parents always" i.e. marriage has little relevance.
Also, just look at every single chart and data point mentioned in the article. All are about one dependent variable: divorce rate. Even if there is room for reasonable disagreement about the implications of the word "stable," reading the article makes it abundantly clear which definition was intended.
On the other side we have the word "divorce", which everyone agrees means "definitely unhappy". However, "not divorced" is definitely not a sufficient condition for "happy". The word "stable" is in the middle and can go either way. In one sense I agree it has a strong similarity to "not divorced". But in another sense, I think a lot of people read "stable marriage" as being very similar to "happy marriage". So to the extent that stable == happy, it's missing the point of the actual stats. And to the extent that stable != happy and a good proxy for not divorced, it's missing the point of what people really want out of life (and marriage).
This brings us to your response to my other comment, and there I think you're right on the money. The purpose of marriage is the main issue here. In my mind, the traditional view is synonymous with "stable" and not getting divorced. And the fact that the OP is talking about "stable" and "divorce" in the way it is suggests that the traditional view of marriage is a strong influence (although maybe my religious background is biasing me here). But none of this is very relevant if "happy" is what people are really after.
That's a very reasonable assumption. But it's also reasonable to analyse divorce rate data. You can't just assume that anyone studying marriage will only be studying how to keep marriages happy. I don't see any claim that this study is the ultimate study on marriage.
Since you cannot a/b test this in individual cases and can only say "people who left earlier have these corresponding average experiences or outcomes compared to people who stayed longer," I think it's a terrible disservice to many people with big life challenges to act like they were just being neurotic to stay as they long as they did.
I know there are people who claim "divorce as such" is bad for kids but I'm very doubtful about that. Divorce can be good or bad depending on how it's done, and how interested both the parents are in their kid's well-being.
However, cohabitation and sex with your eventual spouse before marriage helps your chances.
This is all correlation, of course.
Look away! Look away!
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.
Even a religion without any "supernatural" or "unseen" value would still very likely have these effects.
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.
This is absurd. It's constructed of a series of suppositions, only a few of which I'll address.
First is that people are static. This simply isn't true. We all know that we all change - not just in age, wisdom, and so on, but in tastes, politics, religious dedication, and the lines we draw between wrong and right, just to name a few.
In just these ways, people can grow apart. The distance between these changes can, in fact, cause "irreconcilable differences."
Sometimes these changes are brought about by dramatic stress events, from the death of a child to major swings in financial stability. The way in which these events change the unwilling participants can again lead to incompatibility where once there was compatibility.
But worst is the idea that if people just "work on it" they can overcome anything. Sometimes overcoming growing apart - be it over time or rather quickly - is best done by removing yourself from a situation that is no longer positive, and has little ability to become positive again.
This is where I find religion quite often inserts itself negatively. While I agree with a poster above that regular attendance at religious gatherings does often help a couple share a support network, share common beliefs and similar circles of friends, etc., religion often tells you only divorce or failed marriage is an abomination, and a personal failure requiring lifetime penance. It then follows by labeling that person as an outcast, no longer worthy of the community they had once belonged to.
These are just a few reasons (not to mention physical/substance abuse, and so on) that marriages can fail without it being personal failure. Your assertion does nothing but pile on further stigma to those who have gone through divorce. No one wants their marriage to fail, but when it does, it isn't always personal failure that requires additional shaming from outsiders.
I don't know of anyone who believes people are static. You even say yourself in the next sentence "We all know that we all change". No one (at least that I'm aware of) goes into marriage expecting the person they marry to stay the same over time. Another HN poster (can't remember who) put it beautifully once: marriage is an agreement to learn to love the person that each of you become over time.
A marriage is a promise, a vow, to commit to this. Now, I could certainly see a situation where two people tell each other at the altar "I promise to love and support you always, well... unless we change too much". However, both people should be aware of these terms! You can't make an agreement that you will always, unconditionally support the other person, and then back out of it later because you changed your mind. If both people are in agreement that they might change and get divorced later before the marriage begins, then fine with me. It's not that different than dating with some legal benefits. But if one person thinks they're going into something permanent, and the other person has doubts about it, then that is really not fair to the first person, and I would argue it's essentially evil to be that dishonest to someone.
> further stigma to those who have gone through divorce
There is a stigma, but it's not on divorce; it's on someone who goes back on their word. What are my terms for divorce? If there is abuse or cheating. Those are my only conditions. And before I marry anyone, I will make it very clear that these are the only conditions in which I will abandon them, and if they don't like those terms they can marry someone else. The stigma associated with the vast majority of divorces is that one (or two) people were unable to keep a promise. I don't want to be associated with these kinds of people. My life is simpler and happier if I associate with people who will keep their word at any cost. Maybe your experience is different.
The supposition that it is always possible to learn to love the other person is as ridiculous as the supposition that people are static.
> If both people are in agreement that they might change and get divorced later before the marriage begins, then fine with me.
Everyone who gets married knows that the possibility of divorce exists and roughly what divorce proceedings entail. How does making these details explicit as opposed to implicit help anyone?
> There is a stigma, but it's not on divorce; it's on someone who goes back on their word.
I would wager that very few people are as hot-to-trot as you are on the notion of honor in contract literalism.
> My life is simpler, more enjoyable, and happier if I associate with people who will keep their word at any cost. Maybe your experience is different.
It is. Honesty is valuable, but by my way of reckoning there is little honesty in the practice of enshrining outdated guesses about the future. A promise made without implicit limits is a lie.
No it's not. What do you support that statement with?
> Everyone who gets married knows that the possibility of divorce exists and roughly what divorce proceedings entail.
> I would wager that very few people are as hot-to-trot as you are on the notion of honor in contract literalism
I've found that people's life experiences significantly shape their views on things. Friends of mine that come from family backgrounds with a lot of divorce have the same view that you do. I call it the "realist" view. The idea of a permanent happy relationship is viewed with pessimism, as an "unrealistic fairy tale", because they've either never seen such a thing or experienced it themselves.
On the other hand, I come from a family background with multiple, near-perfect half-century or longer marriages. Out of my entire extended family, only one person has been divorced. And I wonder -- the divorce rate is so much lower in my family (30 or so people) than the rest of society -- why is this? And I think it's the "hot-to-trot notion of contract literalism" that you so summarily dismiss.
There's something fascinating that I've begun to realize in the last few years, and it's that people assume everyone else is more similar to them (or people they grew up with) than is actually the case. Cheaters assume everyone else would secretly cheat, just like them, given a good enough opportunity or motive. Liars assume everyone else does the same. They find it hard to believe that people actually do exist that don't view the world through the same negative lens that they do, including people who will honor their word above all else. And there's more of them than you might think.
(Btw, I didn't downvote you. I wish people wouldn't use the downvote button to express differing opinions; that's what comments are for.)
I come from a family with a history of long, strong marriages. My parents are another success story. They have learned to tolerate each other, and we (my parents, my sister, myself) are all better for it.
What do I base my opinion on?
1. My parents fought on occasion. Screaming matches, passive aggression, shit-talking behind each others backs. It was rare and not nearly enough to threaten the marriage, but it gave me a point of comparison.
2. I had friends whose parents did this constantly. Rather than fighting 5% of the time, they fought 95% of the time. I saw some of it first hand.
3. I had friends whose parents were divorced. It wasn't ideal and it created more than a few miscommunications, but the kids got the attention they needed, they didn't complain about their parents trying to take their anger out on them, and things generally seemed to work out OK.
By "filling in the blanks" in my friend's description of #2 with my own experiences of parental fighting (#1), I believe #2 is a considerably worse state of affairs for all involved than #3.
> projection
Right back at you.
> cheaters, liars project
We are in complete agreement on this point :P
I think we would both agree that there is a "you get out what you put in" effect in marriage. More tolerance and more commitment from either partner greatly increase the strength of the marriage and are generally a good thing. My contentions are that there's a turning point where this stops being true and that contract verbiage is poor at determining this turning point and providing appropriate guidance.
In general, I think this is asymmetrical. People who have never had to deal with complexity in their lives, tend to assume that people can live by simple rules. Until they discover that the world doesn't work that way. Usually by getting their naive ass bitten.
They don't call them realists for no reason. (Yes, I know, spoken like a realist :-)). I don't place much value on the opinions of people who tell me how perfect they or their family is -- usually they avoid digging too far into the fascade because their self-worth is tied to how well they and their group (family) perform whatever role they are holding up as ideal.
On the contrary, I had absolutely no idea how difficult divorce proceedings were when I got married. Maybe I was just naive and living in a bubble, but it was a very real shock to me that, since our divorce was amiable, my wife and I couldn't just go in to the courthouse and tell them we didn't want to be married any more. Instead the legal system forces an adversarial process on you.
Maybe this was just because my religious ideals caused me to not even consider divorce as an option. But even then, it's a very real thing and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person to have been in that boat.
It IS a personal failure, but go ahead, rationalize all you want.
Not everyone views marriage as a contract or as something that cannot be broken ever. The legal status of marriage in a jurisdiction != how people feel about and treat marriage.
> Divorce means your word is worthless, and that your own wants are more important than your word.
Giving your word on something isn't a clause that requires you to give up your own wants and needs. For example, if you married someone and one day they become abusive, you are not obligated to stay and take said abuse.
> It IS a personal failure, but go ahead, rationalize all you want.
This attitude is so unhelpful and smacks of a superiority complex.
Not all marriages are presumed to be "for as long as you shall live". Though they don't usually have a set term, civil marriages (at least around here) are not that tied to Christian values anymore.
Uh, there are totally such things as a bad marriage. If, say, your spouse became abusive over time from the perspective of the abused spouse it most certainly a bad marriage.
Marriage isn't a one time negotiation and you are stuck with whatever happens after that. Relationships require constant work and growth over time. If two people find themselves in a place where that relationship isn't working for them and even is outright harmful to their well being, they have all rights to end that relationship.
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.
"People don't change" is kind of a funny phrase too - there's some truth in it, but I'm certainly not the same person I was when I married over twenty-seven years ago.
My wife has changed too - we're not young anymore and yet our love (and devotion) to each other is more multi-faceted because we love who we were together as well as who we are now together.
One piece of advice for the nerds out there ... don't stop doing the things you did when you were wooing him/her. It's easy to say "I've caught him/her" and figure that's the end of the project. Just like in software development, at least 80% of the work is maintenance after release/marriage.
And people fail, sometimes avoidably, sometimes not. We are rarely tested to our breaking point, and it's easy to be smug when we see others fail, thinking we could have succeeded where they did not. The tendency to believe that anyone who has failed is "making excuses" is understandable, but one of the great things about maker culture is the way it embraces failure: it recognizes that we all can stretch ourselves too far and that there are circumstances where no physically conceivable amount of effort could have created success.
Under such circumstances it's important to fail gracefully, not to deny the possibility of or responsibility for failure. I think this happens a lot in divorce: people blame their partner because they aren't willing to say, "I have failed", and that creates a huge amount of pain and divisiveness, and even worse, it makes lawyers rich.
Failure is always an option. We know this as makers, hackers and engineers. It isn't simply a matter of "trying harder". Some problems cannot be solved under the constraints we are given, and when that happens we have failed, as surely as a girder that has buckled under an excessive load. This conundrum is sometimes known as "the human condition": http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_strain.htm
That being said, I've never met you and have no idea who you are, so don't take this too seriously, just some random advice
I think this is a pretty bold statement. Is it not possible that two people might just never be able to get along with each other, no matter how hard they try?
And I'm going to stand by it - I actually believe the statistics presented in the parent post and, would those two people (who "just might never be able to get along with each other") have discovered their incompatibility if they'd dated for more than a couple years?
Of course they would. But we were discussing arranged and religiously motivated marriages, where that opportunity might not be afforded. Is there still "no such thing as a bad marriage" even when you "marry strangers"?
In any case, I think that social pressure can be a pretty strong force and that it tends to counteract the sort of selfishness that leads to a "bad marriage". Of course bad marriages will statistically happen but I don't think you can claim the huge number of divorces we're seeing are all "bad marriages" - my premise is that many could be cured if both participants cared to work a bit.
How do we measure whether the amount of caring done was enough or not? Considering it varies based on personalities and other convincing capabilities of a partner, how do we know for sure apart from just getting information from the partners themselves who say that they tried a lot to make it work.
Its important to remember that there is lot of suffering involved when one of the partner keeps working due to societal pressure while the other continues to mistreat them. This is more prevalent in developing countries like India and China. There is only so much a person can try on their own(they cant stand shaming so dont share oppression with other family)
The other somewhat related topic is abuse victims. Even without societal pressure, they'll often convince themselves they deserve it and stay with their abuser.
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.
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.
It is, but thing I would encourage people to keep in mind if they're wondering whether they want to participate in such a tradition is: Your marriage will be what you make it. No particular marriage has to be patriarchal, though of course many are.
You may choose, for example, not to have the wife change her last name; or maybe you both change your last names to something new, maybe by combining parts of your names (I saw this done once). The significance of that is symbolic, of course -- it expresses your commitment to an equal marriage; it doesn't absolve you of doing the hard work to make that a reality -- but it can be an important symbol.
You also might want to take a close look at the wedding ceremony itself. Using two rings is an easy step. The old tradition of having the bride's father "give her away" is one that I would suggest you might want to omit. If you can't bring yourselves to do that, maybe you could have the groom's mother also give him away -- people will laugh, but you'll make your point. Anyway, the larger point is, it's your ceremony, and you get to design it.
Can you have an equal marriage without doing any of those things? Of course you can, but if you find yourselves resistant to symbolic actions like these, you might want to ask yourselves why, because if you resist the symbols you will very likely resist the reality.
I'd like to hear more of that argument. Most specific marriage ceremonies are religious, of course, but I'm skeptical that the concept of (pledged) life-long monogamy and cooperative child-rearing has its roots in religion.
As for marriage being patriarchal, I don't really see how that's the case, at least any more than the entire world is patriarchal. I do suspect that monogamy comes from the selective pressure for males to have confidence in the paternity of their mates' children, so in that sense I suppose you could call it "patriarchal."
I am in favour of marriage for anyone who wants to have kids--which of course includes gay people and sterile people, thanks to technology and adoption--because it's a means of recruiting community support. Raising children well is hard, and the more people involved the better. Before the church got involved, this was essentially the purpose of marriage.
Some will still get married, even forward thinking secular people. There's a big difference between trying to build a family with someone who wants to partner up for as long as they're not unhappy, and having kids with someone who at least aspires to a permanent commitment. Marriage is pretty messed up in the U.S., but I still think it makes more sense to get married if you want to have kids.
Some won't. I don't think a culture built around transitory relationships is a good one for either parents or children. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a backlash in time, though I think another possibility is people just give up on having kids altogether. We'll have to see.
There are also some legal advantages in case the relationship ends with regards to income, assets, and child custody.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So then, for women, it is the above, plus this delicate balancing act: Make sure to marry a man who earns enough so that the combined household income is $125k+, while not caring much about his wealth.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
The short answer is: don't do the expensive things people normally do at their weddings.
It's not required to have a meal at a wedding; some American subcultures expect cake and punch only. It's not required to spend thousands on a single-use dress; my grandma still brags about getting her dress on clearance and being able to wear it for multiple occasions. It's not required to have thousands of dollars of flowers; at my wedding, my mother-in-law and her friends grew flowers in their gardens for us, and my sister's wedding (one week from today) will use the church's silk flowers. You can actually have a wedding with 200+ guests and still come in under $1000 if that happens to align with your priorities.
Venue: grandparent's backyard. Had that not been available a local church's community center would have worked (usually free or "free" with a donation of like $500).
Food: simple catered food. The wedding had a picnic theme (summer wedding) so we went w/ sliders and other finger foods. $8/head
Chairs and tables: Rented, but set up ourselves.
Photographer: Flew in someone from out of state. Much cheaper than a local LA photographer.
Dance Floor: Rented ($800) DJ: iPod with a playlist
Decorations: made our own decorations, borrowed strands of lights, etc.
It was a great wedding, wasn't terribly expensive and had a lot of guests.
The short version is we planned our wedding with a mindset of "we want as many of the people we care about to be able to share this day with us as possible, and since we have a limited budget we're only going to spend it on things that make a positive difference in the day".
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.
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.
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.
50% of marriages end in divorce,
the other 50% end in death.
Mazel tov.
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
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.
It's actually really good advice for many other things too.
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 :)
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.
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) 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.
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.
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/
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.
It is possible to love someone deeply and still separate. The cause of separation might be out of love.
"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.
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.
None of this really bears out.
Please see http://tylervigen.com/ for more intriguing, though meaningless correlations.