Ask people to describe their ideal marriage (or relationship) and you may hear phrases such as “soul mates,” “equal sharing,” and “someone who fulfills my innermost self” (Amato, 2007; Dew & Wilcox, 2011). This vision of “lovers for life,” who work and share the housework equally, is a product of living in the contemporary, developed world.

Throughout history, as I implied in Chapter 10, people often got married based on practical concerns. With marriages often being arranged by the couple’s parents, and daily life being so difficult, we did not have the luxury of marrying for love. In addition, in the not-so-distant past, life expectancy was so low that the typical marriage only lasted a decade or two before one partner died.

Then, in the early twentieth century, as life got easier and health care advances allowed us to routinely live into later life, in Western nations, we developed the idea that people should get married in their twenties and be lovers for a half-century or more. The traditional 1950s Leave It to Beaver marriage, with defined gender roles, reflected this vision of enduring love (Amato, 2007; Cherlin, 2004; Coontz, 1992).

In the last third of the twentieth century, Western ideas about marriage took another turn. The women’s movement told us that women should have careers and spouses should share the child care. As a result of the 1960s lifestyle revolution, which stressed personal fulfillment, we rejected the idea that people should stay in an unhappy marriage. We could get divorced, have babies without being married, and choose not to get married at all.

The outcome was the dramatic change that social scientists call the deinstitutionalization of marriage (Cherlin, 2004, 2010). This phrase means that marriage has been transformed from the standard adult “institution” into an optional choice.

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Figure 11.1 shows one symptom of this transformation in the United States: A steady cohort-by-cohort rise in cohabitation rates during the emerging adult years. When people born in the late 1950s and early 1960s (shown in the first bar of the figure) were in their twenties, only 1 in 3 women dared move in with a romantic partner without a wedding ring. (This was called “living in sin.”) With the cohabitation odds now reversing to 2 in 3, living together before getting married is a normal event (Vespa, 2014).

The most revealing change relates to serial cohabitation—living with different partners sequentially during adult life. When emerging adults cohabit with only one person, they are more apt to see this arrangement as a step to a wedding ring (“We want to see if we can make it as husband and wife”). Serial cohabiters are unlikely to have any marriage goals (Vespa, 2014). They may join the millions of contemporary women who give birth without a spouse.

This brings up the most controversial U.S. change: unmarried parenthood. During the 1950s, if a U.S. woman dared to have a baby without being married, her family might ship her off to a home for unwed mothers or insist that she marry the dad (the infamously named “shotgun marriage”). A half-century later, with only 11 percent of U.S. women without a college degree being married before giving birth (Gibson-Davis & Rackin, 2014), the disconnect between marriage and a baby carriage, for less well-educated Americans, is a predictable path (see also Manning, Brown, & Payne, 2014).

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Acceptance of divorce, cohabitation, and unmarried motherhood clearly varies around the globe. How are these lifestyles playing out in countries famous for rigid marriage rules? For answers, let’s travel to Iran and India.

Iran: Eroding Male Dominated Marriage

When we imagine cultures most horrified by our “decadent” Western practices, countries such as Iran might come to mind. In Iran, in accordance with fundamentalist Islamic Law, marriage is the only acceptable life path. Moreover, Iran’s Civil Code includes provisions suggesting that women are subservient to men. A daughter should be pure—meaning a virgin—until she marries, on pain of shaming the family name. After she marries, a wife is expected to obey a spouse. Husbands traditionally can forbid their wives to go to school and to work, as a female’s proper role is to care for children and the house.

Just as shocking to Western eyes were Iranian regulations surrounding divorce: Husbands have decision-making power to dissolve a marriage. Ex-wives are barred from receiving alimony. The man automatically gets custody of the children once they are over a certain age. So, it’s no wonder that Iranian mothers classically warned their daughters: “A woman will go to her husband’s house with her veil and come out with her . . . (shroud)” (quoted in Aghajanian & Thompson, 2013, p. 113).

Within the past 15 years, these pronouncements lost force. Iranian women can now initiate divorce proceedings and draw up prenuptial agreements, spelling out their right to work; they can insist on getting half of the man’s property if the couple splits up.

Moreover, in recent decades, women in Iran made massive strides in moving into the wider world. In Iran today—as in the West—more women enroll in universities than men (Abbas-Shavazi, Mohammad, & McDonald, 2008). Although—in contrast to the West—only about 1 in 5 married Iranian women are in the labor force, women are postponing marriage until older ages. In fact, in the last 15 years, divorce rates in this nation accelerated, to outpace those in Catholic countries such as Ireland, Italy, and Spain. Bottom line: Iran is becoming a more gender equal nation, where the first stages of the deinstitutionalization of marriage have arrived (see Aghajanian & Thompson, 2013).

India: From Arranged Marriages to Eloping for Love

India is an even stronger “anti-Western” marriage model because of its arranged marriages, unions in which parents choose their child’s spouse. As late as 2005, most wives in India reported that their families had made the primary decision about whom they would wed, and many barely knew their husbands before their wedding day. However, with the younger generation now having veto power over parental choices, here, too, arranged marriage is in steep decline.

The most radical change relates to what people in India call elopements: Young people run away and get engaged without their parents’ consent. What typically happens here is that the girl leaves home without telling her parents (or the boy and girl both leave home). Then, the boy’s family goes to the girl’s family, informs them of her whereabouts and gets consent for the marriage. A few months later, unless the girl’s parents forbid the union, the couple formally weds (Allendorf, 2013).

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What do people think about this change? For answers researchers traveled to a rural area of India to conduct interviews. While believing that each type of marriage had its pluses and minuses, most residents were in favor of elopements. Well-educated people in particular used the phrases, “modern,” “advanced,” and “forward” to describe this trend.

India is miles from Western in its marriage views. However, in this nation, it seems appropriate to cite the lyrics, “The times they are a changing.”

Western Variations

The deinstitutionalization of marriage is the melody now being played throughout the developed world. Still, as Figure 11.2 shows, attitudes toward alternate family forms differ from nation to nation in the West. Because the United States is ambivalent about unmarried motherhood, women who give birth without a wedding ring, particularly those who move from cohabiting relationship to relationship, are far more likely to be poor (Farber & Miller-Cribbs, 2014; Nepomnyaschy & Teitler, 2013). Scandinavia has no stigma attached to these lifestyle choices. So in this nation, unmarried couples with children cohabit at every educational and economic rung (Vanassche, Swicegood, & Matthijs, 2013).

The reality is that the United States is still in love with marriage. Roughly 8 out of 10 U.S. young people want to eventually get married—the same fraction as in the past (Manning, Longmore, & Giordano, 2007). But before taking this step, we want to be sure we have the foundations in place.

Think about your requirements for getting married if you are single—or, if you are married, think of your personal goals before you were wed. In addition to finding the right person, if you are like most people, you probably believe that making this commitment demands reaching a certain place in your development. It’s important to have a solid sense of identity and to be financially secure (Gibson-Davis, 2009; Umberson, Pudrovska, & Reczek, 2010; also, recall Chapter 10). Therefore, because we select partners according to homogamy, the marriage market for less-well-educated young people is poor (Gibson-Davis, 2009; Gibson-Davis & Rackin, 2014). Even when couples are committed to each other, it can be difficult to move from living together to getting engaged.

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Read what Candace, a 25-year-old, had to say about her marriage plans:

Um, we have certain things that we want to do before we get married. We both want very good jobs. . . . He’s been looking out for jobs everywhere and we— . . . we’re trying. We just want to have—we gotta have everything before we say, “Let’s get married.”

(quoted in Smock, Manning, & Porter, 2005, p. 690)

As this comment implies, rather than blaming a “culture of irresponsibility” (see Murray, 2012), the lack of well-paying jobs is a major reason why many U.S. young people at the lower end of the economic spectrum never wed (Bianchi & Milkie, 2010). Today, for increasing numbers of young women, having babies is the main marker of adulthood. Getting married can seem like a hazy, far-in-the-future goal (Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Parham-Payne, Dickerson, & Everette, 2013).

Another goal that seems hard to reach—for everyone, rich or poor—is staying married for life. I got insights into the awe young people feel about this achievement when a college-student server came up to my husband and me at a local restaurant and shyly asked for our secret when we said we had been married for over 30 years.

Is our dream of finding a life soul mate too idealistic, given that we never expected people to stay madly in love for 50 or more years? How can couples stay together for decades when there are so many alternatives to marriage today? In the next section, I’ll focus on this question as I explore the insights that research offers for having enduring, happy relationships. Let’s begin, however, by tracing how marital happiness normally changes through the years.

Many of us enter marriage (or any romantic relationship) with blissful expectations. Then, disenchantment sets in. Hundreds of studies conducted in Western countries show that marital satisfaction is at its peak during the honeymoon and then decreases (Blood & Wolfe, 1960; Glenn, 1990; Lavner & Bradbury, 2010). As the decline—statistically speaking—is steepest during the first few years, some researchers believe that if people make it beyond four years of marriage, they have passed the main divorce danger zone (Bradbury & Karney, 2004).

Notice the interesting similarity to John Bowlby’s ideas about the different attachment phases. In the first year or two of marriage, couples are in the phase of clear-cut attachment, when they are madly in love and see their significant other as the center of life. As they move into their relationship’s working model phase—developing more separate lives, getting involved in the wider world—they risk disconnecting from their spouse.

The good news is that there is a positive change to look forward to later on. According to the U-shaped curve of marital satisfaction, after it dips to a low point, couples can get happier at the empty nest, when the children leave the house and husbands and wives have the luxury of focusing on each other again (Glenn, 1990; White & Edwards, 1990). And, at retirement, the curve can swing up even more. Compared to middle-aged couples, elderly spouses fight less. They relate in kinder, less combative ways (Carstensen, Graff, Levenson & Gottman, 1996; Windsor & Butterworth, 2010).

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Happy elderly couples actually embody many of the good love-relationship principles spelled out in Chapter 10. They idealize their partners (“Your grandma is the best woman in the world!”); and, you might be interested to know, men who rank themselves as disagreeable are especially likely to display this trait (“How did I deserve this woman? I married a saint!”) (O’Rourke and others, 2010). And, not only is there a well-known correlation between being married and living longer (Robles and others, 2014), being old-old and happily married mutes feelings of distress when old age disabilities strike (Waldinger & Schultz, 2010). So, we are right to yearn to stay married “till death do us part”—if (and this is a very important “if”) our marriage is a happy one.

This brings up individual differences. Many of you may know miserable, long-married 80-year-olds who may be making each other ill, or be fortunate to have friends who buck the U-shaped curve and grow happier as the years pass. For some newlyweds, marital happiness declines sharply during the first four years; for others, it wanes slightly. Interestingly, we can predict the steepness of this early downslide by examining marriage attitudes on the wedding day.

Almost everyone gets married convinced the statistics don’t apply to them: “We are going to live happily ever after. Our relationship will improve over time, and it certainly won’t get worse.” Ironically, in tracking newly married couples, researchers found women who held these optimistic ideas to an extreme were at special risk of being disenchanted, or totally turned off, in the next few years (Lavner, Karney, & Bradbury, 2013).

Why might seeing one’s marriage—in particular—as flawless promote distress? For answers, researchers made the interesting distinction between being a generally optimistic person and being optimistic about a marriage. People who were generally upbeat, they found, were prone to constructively solve marital conflicts. But spouses who magically believed, “We can’t have problems,” developed a shocked, learned- helplessness attitude when reality hit. Unprepared for disagreements, expecting romance to conquer all, they were blindsided when things didn’t go as planned, and so poorly equipped to deal with the normal ups and downs of married life (Neff & Geers, 2013).

What does it mean to constructively handle conflicts, and what other attitudes help us stay together happily for life? To offer some perspective on these issues let’s first spell out a familiar psychologist’s (that is, from his theory of intelligence, described in Chapter 7) conceptualizations about love—Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory.

According to Sternberg’s (1986, 1988, 2004) triangular theory of love, we can break adult love relationships into three components: passion (sexual arousal), intimacy (feelings of closeness), and commitment (typically marriage, but also exclusive, lifelong cohabiting relationships). When we arrange them on a triangle such as Figure 11.3, as I’ll describe next, we get a portrait of the different kinds of relationships in life.

With passion alone, we have a crush, the fantasy obsession for the girl down the street or a handsome professor we don’t really know. With intimacy alone, we have the caring that we feel for a best friend. Romantic love combines these two qualities. Walk around your campus and you can see this relationship. Couples are passionate and clearly know each other well but have probably not made a commitment to form a lifelong bond.

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On the marriage side of the triangle, commitment alone results in “empty marriages.” In these emotionally barren, loveless marriages (luckily, fairly infrequent today), people stay together physically but live separate lives. Intimacy plus commitment produces companionate marriages, the best-friend relationships that long-married couples may have after passion is gone. Finally, recall from the bottom of the diagram that a few married couples stay together because they share sexual passion and nothing else. The ideal in our culture is consummate love—a relationship that combines passion, intimacy, and commitment.

Why is consummate love fragile? One reason is that, with familiarity, passion often falls off. It’s hard to keep lusting after your mate when you wake up together day after day for years (Klusmann, 2002). This sexual decline has an unfortunate hormonal basis. Married couples—both men and women—show lower testosterone levels than their single or divorced counterparts (Barrett and others, 2013; Gettler and others, 2013).

As couples enter into the working-model phase of their marriage, and move out into the world, intimacy can also wane. You and your partner don’t talk the way you used to. Work or the children are more absorbing. You may become “ships passing in the night.”

Sternberg’s theory beautifully alerts us to why marriages normally get less happy. But it does not offer clues as to how we can beat the odds and stay romantically connected for life. Actually, a fraction of couples (roughly 1 in 10 people) do stay passionate for decades (Acevedo & Aron, 2009). What are these marital role models doing right? For answers, researchers decided to decode the experience of falling in love.

When we fall in love, they discovered, efficacy feelings are intense. We feel powerful, competent, capable of doing wonderful things (Aron and others, 2002). Given that romantic love causes a joyous feeling of self-expansion (and boosts testosterone!), couldn’t we teach people to preserve passion and intimacy by encouraging couples to share exciting activities that expand the self?

To test this idea, the psychologists asked married volunteers to list their most exciting activities—the passions that gave them a sense of flow (see Chapter 10). Then, they instructed one group of husbands and wives to engage in the stimulating activities both partners had picked out (for example, going to concerts or skiing) frequently over 10 weeks. As they predicted, marital happiness rose among these couples compared to control groups who were told to engage in pleasant but not especially interesting activities (such as going out to dinner) or just to follow their normal routine (Reissman, Aron, & Bergen, 1993).

So, to stay passionate for decades, people may not need to take trips to Tahiti, or even have candlelit dinners with a mate. The secret is to continue to engage in the flow-inducing activities that may have brought couples together in the first place. If you connected through your commitment to church, take mission trips with your mate. If you met through your passion for skate boarding, sharpen those skills with your spouse. The problem is that during the working-model phase of a relationship, arousing activities that expand ourselves tend to migrate outside of married life. When work does become more compelling (or flow-inducing), people may find their partner dull. Worse yet, they may fall in love with someone who is on the scene to promote their most efficacious, attractive self: “I feel so competent, powerful, and energized at my job. Hey, wait a second! It’s my co-worker, not my wife, who is bringing out my best self!” Keeping “growth experiences” within a marriage helps keep marital (and sexual) passion alive.

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But sharing exciting activities may not be sufficient to keep couples glued to one another during the stresses and storms of daily life. People must be committed to a spouse.

Researchers are passionate to identify the glue called “commitment,” the inner attitudes that keep couples hanging in happily together over years (Epstein, Pandit, & Thakar, 2013). One force that fosters commitment, they find, is believing one’s union is sanctified by god (“My marriage is an expression of god’s will”) (Stafford, David, & McPherson, 2014; Kusner and others, 2014). This conviction of being destined for a particular person—Jewish people use the evocative word bashert, or meant to be—explains why arranged marriages, because they eliminate any choice, can sometimes be happier than those that happen the romantic way (Epstein, Pandit, & Thakar, 2013). When you marry with the idea of “this must work,” love can unexpectedly flower. As one African American man married for decades, explained to researchers:

I was committed to proving them [others’ predictions] wrong . . . somewhere along in trying to stay in there to prove everyone wrong, I fell in love. I probably should have fallen in love before I said “I do” . . . but I wasn’t you know . . . —it’s amazing!

(quoted in Hurt, 2013, p. 870)

But if you assume commitment means making the best of a relationship because there is no alternative (as in the lyrics, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”), you are wrong. Commitment involves immensely positive emotions, too.

Committed spouses are dedicated to a partner’s “inner growth” (Fincham, Stanley, & Beach, 2007; Overall, Fletcher, & Simpson, 2010). Specifically, commitment involves sacrifice, giving up one’s desires to further the other person’s joy. When people sacrifice for their partner, they are benefiting themselves. Drawing on our natural high from performing costly prosocial acts (recall Chapters 4 and 6), there is no greater joy than performing personally difficult acts for the people we love (Kogan and others, 2010).

Intrinsic to sacrifice is compassion, being devoted to the other person’s well-being. In one study, older couples who checked items such as “I spend a lot of time concerned about my partner,” were particularly likely to have happy married lives (Sabey, Rauer, & Jensen, 2014). Here, too, compassion benefited givers more than receivers. Feeling compassion for a spouse—not believing one’s partner had that feeling—cemented one’s attachment to a mate. These commitment attitudes, in turn, translate into specific communication styles.

Watch happy couples, whether they are age 80 or 18, and you will be struck with the way they relate. Like mothers and babies enjoying the dance of attachment, loving couples share joyous experiences. They are playful, affectionate. They use humor to signal, “I love you,” even when they disagree (Driver & Gottman, 2004). During disagreements, women in happy relationships regulate their emotions. They dampen down angry feelings rather than letting the situation get out of hand (Bloch, Haase, & Levenson, 2014).

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But have you ever spent an evening with friends and had the uneasy feeling, “This relationship isn’t working out”? By listening to couples talk, psychologist John Gottman (1994, 1999) can tell, with uncanny accuracy, whether a marriage is becoming unglued. Here are three communication styles that distinguish thriving relationships from those with serious problems:

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Researchers stress that we need to think of divorce as having specific phases. When people consider this major life change, they weigh the costs of leaving against the benefits (Hopper, 1993; Kelly, 2000). You and your spouse are not getting along, but perhaps you should just hang on. One deterrent is financial: “Can I afford the loss in income after a divorce?” But if the couple has children, money issues are trumped by a more critical concern: “How will divorce affect my parenting?” “Will this damage my daughter or son?” (See Poortman & Seltzer, 2007; recall also Chapter 7.)

Couples typically cite communication problems like those I’ve been discussing, and lack of “attachment,” as the reasons for their divorce (Bodenmann and others, 2007). In extreme cases, women report being denigrated and completely controlled: “If I had a . . . contrary opinion,” (one woman complained) “then the reaction would be, ‘Well what do you know?’” (Adapted from Watson & Ancis, 2013, p.173.)

Once a couple separates, they experience an overload of changes: the need to move or perhaps find a better-paying job (Amato, 2010). Housework burdens rise, particularly for men (Hewitt, Haynes, & Baxter, 2013). There are the legal hassles, anxieties about the children, and telling loved ones (“How will my friends and family feel?”).

Still, divorce can produce emotional growth and enhanced efficacy feelings as people learn they can make it on their own (Fahs, 2007; Hetherington & Kelly, 2002). And, of course, ending a marriage can come as a welcome relief (Montemurro, 2014). Perhaps aided by that burst of testosterone, some women rediscover their sexuality, too. Listen to a 58-year-old woman whose husband divorced her after years of an unfulfilling sexual relationship: “I’ve been like reborn almost . . . in the sexual realm. . . . It’s like a renewal” (Montemurro, 2014, p. 83).

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Who feels relieved or sexually energized after divorce? Insights come from considering why people separate. In one U.S. study tracking married couples, researchers put divorced couples into two categories: spouses who had reported being miserable in their marriage, and couples who divorced, even though they had previously judged their marital happiness as “fairly good” (Amato, 2010; Amato & Hohmann-Marriott, 2007).

People in very unhappy marriages did feel liberated after divorcing. But relatively satisfied couples who later divorced, perhaps thinking, “I just don’t find our relationship fulfilling,” reported subsequent declines in well-being! Given this finding, family expert Paul Amato (2007, 2010) suggests that perhaps our cultural fantasy of finding a life soul mate (or the sense that something is missing if we don’t automatically have intimacy and passion for life) lures people to leave a marriage who might be better off remaining with their spouse. And what happens to children when couples make this choice? If your house is a battleground, as I described in Chapter 7, it’s better for the children if you divorce. But imagine being shocked to learn that your parents are separating when you always believed their marriage was perfectly fine. Then, think of having to adjust to a new family when your mom or dad remarries again.

Now, let’s explore the feelings these men and women are experiencing by turning to parenthood, that second important adult role.

Question 11.1

1. In Sweden, unmarried couples with children are far more likely to be poor.

2. In the United States, we no longer believe in marriage.

3. In Iran today, married women have far more rights than in the past.

4. In India, arranged marriages are in decline.

c and d

Question 11.2

1. After being extremely happy with each other during the first three years, Ted and Elaine now find that their marriage has gone steadily downhill.

2. Steve and Betty’s marriage has had many unpredictable ups and downs over the years.

3. Dave and Erika’s marital satisfaction declined, especially during the first four years, but has dramatically improved now that their children have left home.

c

Question 11.3

According to Sternberg, by looking at three dimensions— passion, intimacy, and commitment—and exploring their combinations we can get a portrait of all the partner love relationships that exist in life. By exploring how these facets change over time, we can also understand why marital happiness might naturally decline over the years. (a) This couple is extremely emotionally involved (has intimacy and passion) but has not decided to get married or enter a fully committed relationship. (b) This couple has it all: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Most likely, they are newlyweds. (c) This couple is best friends (intimate) and married (committed) but no longer passionate. Couples who have been married for decades are most likely to have companionate marriages.

Question 11.4

Sharing mutually exciting activities cements passion. Commitment grows out of (and is embodied by) feeling devoted to a partner’s well-being.

Question 11.5

(1) Spend time together doing exciting activities you both enjoy. (2) Practice sacrificing for your mate (giving up activities you might enjoy to further your partner’s happiness). (3) Keep disagreements to the topic; never get personal when fighting; hold off from giving too much advice.

Question 11.6

Be careful! You may more quickly contemplate leaving your new spouse when you disagree. Your children are apt to feel threatened by your new relationship, and may place barriers to your getting along.

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