What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

What makes for a stable marriage? Part 2

randalolson.com

66 pointsredknight66676 comments

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 :)

> (...) 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.

> You know from the onset the path all the way through.

Spoken like someone without kids.

> "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."

s/kids/startups/ to see how ridiculous this sounds. Any kind of presumption that other people should make certain major life decisions a certain way just because you feel that will make them happy sounds extremely presumptuous.

Selfish jerks can benefit the most from having kids :) Unless your legit nuts or completely broke, it is a good thing for all.

Having kids is like going to college. Its expensive, difficult and challenging.. but in the end, you are sad to think of what would have happened if you had not taken the plunge.

Sure it's presumptuous, but not as presumptuous as your substitution. Kids are a biological imperative, startups are not, so it's not quite that ridiculous-sounding.

humans are animal and as such we have the instinct to procreate. Maybe this is not true for all humans but most of them will feel that urge. Natural selection works pretty well on this: the one that don't feel that urge will be less likely to procreate and so to pass their genes to the next generation.

> My amateur theory is that fundamentally speaking a couple is supposed to have kids. It's what we were designed to do.

That's certainly what evolution has favored (by definition) in terms of primal drives, but that doesn't mean that living life without them is in some sense "empty". Evolution isn't innately wise; e.g. we have very common diseases like cancers, dementia etc in the population because they tend to show up late in life, after the next generation has already been produced. So, just because some particular behavior or attribute is in our genes does not make it "good", it just means that we are programmed in that way due to some set of evolutionary-historical circumstances.

And on the flip side to your point, if you have kids as a way to fill a void in your life, you may find yourself having an existential crisis when they move out and go to college.

I think reproduction is a pretty fundamental instinct that goes back almost to the beginning of life on this planet. We're programmed to reproduce. Even people who intellectually choose not to reproduce are drawn to the sexual act of reproduction, though of course they defeat the mechanism with birth control devices.

I don't think you contradict anything I said - we're in agreement that it's in our programming.

Sure, we're programmed to have sex. But gay people are programmed to have gay sex, which doesn't result in children.

Some people have a parental instinct. Many people, including me, don't.

> a couple is supposed to have kids. It's what we were designed to do.

This misses to very important points.

First, we weren't designed.

Second, while it is true that there is evolutionary pressure to have a desire to reproduce one's genes, this is a gross oversimplification of our nature. We are not merely survival machines for our genes. We have these big brains, which give rise to all kinds of interesting secondary phenomena, like having ideas, making music, writing poetry, inventing computers, and arguing about things on hacker news. Because of this incredible richness and diversity of potential human experience, raising kids is just one of myriad ways to have a happy and fulfilled life.

This misses the fundamental point: we were designed to reproduce. It's innate to not just our species, not just our kingdom, but to basically every living thing.

And yes, I would argue in fact that we are merely survival machines for our genes. We homo sapiens fancy ourselves above the fray, but in reality we are every bit as much part of the cycle of life as are bacteria, trees, and fish.

> we were designed to reproduce

No, we weren't designed to do anything (because we weren't designed). We reproduce because reproduction is an essential component of the evolutionary process that created us. But:

1) for humans, reproduction of memes is at least as important a component of our evolution as reproduction of genes and

2) even if you consider only reproduction of genes, the reproduction of genes is NOT the same as the reproduction of individuals.

You should read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.

  [...]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.

...this is still very common, though perhaps it's a culture you aren't exposed to very often.

> It's what we were designed to do.

No, we weren't 'designed' to do anything. Evolution hard-wires us to have sex, by making sex pleasurable. Kids are just a by-product. The parental instinct varies from person to person, just like some people are gay, and some people have 0 parental instincts, like me.

> people mistakenly feel they'll have a happier life without them, but in a certain sense it's an empty life.

That's your opinion. My opinion is, my life would be empty if I didn't achieve anything significant because I was too busy looking after kids / paying for them, etc.

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.

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.

That disclaimer is not enough and doesn't justify a link bait title.

"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?

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.

Perhaps (at least in this data), the women were more likely to have been married multiple times?

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

Apart from the small sample size, if they collected data by mechnical turk then I wonder what sort of biases that introduces? In the paper you linked, Frances and Mialon state:

"Samples of mTurk workers have been found to be more representative of the US population than in-person convenience samples, standard internet samples, and typical college samples"

I am somewhat sceptical of this, and there seems to be some evidence to back-up my scepticism [1][2][3]. In particular, [2] states:

"In sum, the MTurk sample is younger, more male, poorer, and more highly educated than Americans generally. This matches the image of who you might think would be online doing computer tasks for a small amount of money."

Which are some of the factors that the marriage study itself seeks to examine. This looks like lazy data collection methodology to me.

[1] http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/7/10/fooled-twice...

[2] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/19/how-representative-are-a...

[3] http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographi...

It merely says that it's more representative than the other groups, not that it's particularly representative. For instance college samples are massively unrepresentative (younger, smarter, probably wealthier than average).

Essentially it's just a more representative sample than these other horribly unrepresentative samples he's listing.

Thank you, that makes sense. I assumed that he was surveying relationships rather than individuals (ie divorces rather than divorcees), which was a poor assumption on my part.

Nevertheless, it would have useful if the nature of the data was better described in the article itself. I run a comment blocker in Chrome so I didn't see the comments until you mentioned them.

Divorced individuals of either gender may married people who have never been previously married.

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.

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.

"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).

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.

In my country, with loads of unemployment (23%) and people struggling to meet ends, some people don't divorce because they can't afford it. Harsh but true.

Just a litte question, why using divorse and not divorce, just spelling or any other reason?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?)

Check out the paper (Table 3) for significance statements: 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.

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!

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?

  [...] 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.

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

And comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442036

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

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

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/

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-woma...

"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.

A dark re-twist to the technological adoption of "infant mortality rate".

I should stop thinking of such connections.

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.

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.

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/...

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_y...

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?

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.

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

#hashtagsarestupid

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

Both of those things could be improved by marrying the right person.

survivorship bias much

;)

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.

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.

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.

* Married men are more productive (Or at least earn more): http://econ.ucdenver.edu/public/laura/Class/korenmanneumark....

* married men live longer : http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Healt...

Correction: married men must earn more & non-divorced men live longer :-)

Sorry, which study did you cite for this correction? Or are you just proposing a potential confounding variable?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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