Before I Do: Experience, Marriage, and Human Happiness

A new study on marital satisfaction passes on what strikes me as some grim evidence about people, or at least contemporary Americans. The study is based on something called the Relationship Development Study:

Between 2007 and 2008, more than one thousand Americans who were unmarried but in a relationship, and between age 18 and 34, were recruited into the study. Over the course of the next five years, 418 of those individuals got married. We looked closely at those 418 new marriages. We examined the history of the spouses’ relationship, looked at their prior romantic experiences, and asked them about the quality of their marriages. After analyzing the data, we came to three major conclusions that we will discuss in greater depth in this report. . .  Some couples slide through major relationship transitions, while others make intentional decisions about moving through them. The couples in the latter category fare better. Choices about weddings seem to say something important about the quality of marriages. Our first major conclusion challenges what we’ll call the Vegas Fallacy—the idea that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Actually, what people do before marriage appears to matter. Specifically, how they conduct their romantic lives before they tie the knot is linked to their odds of having happy marriages. 

Obviously there are a lot of problems with this study, starting from the tiny sample size and the gigantic bit of question begging at its center: what is a "high quality marriage" anyway, and who gets to say? But let me first review the findings. They all follow what you might call the contemporary conservative paradigm: people who have formal weddings, people who discuss changes in relationship status and make them deliberately, and people who do not have children before marrying are all happier. Second marriages are worse. The finding getting the most attention is the one summarized in the graph at the top of the post: the more sexual partners a woman has before marriage, the less likely she is to be in one of those "high quality marriages." The effect for men is negligible.

The authors interpret this as being all about making decisions and following through:

Making a clear, deliberate decision to commit to one option and reject alternative options strengthens a person’s tendency to follow through on the commitment.

That is, people who are happily married are those who really throw themselves into being married and are determined to make it work and make it good. As the ancient Buddhist saying puts it, First, intention; then, enlightenment.

This ties into how the study's authors explain the finding about promiscuity:

Why would having more experience be associated with worse outcomes? We generally operate under the assumption that people with more experience, in a job, for example, are experts and therefore better than novices or new hires. Shouldn’t having more relationship experience also make people wiser in their love lives?

One reason that more experience could lead to lower marital quality is that more experience may increase one’s awareness of alternative partners. A strong sense of alternatives is believed to make it harder to maintain commitment to, and satisfaction with, what one already has. People who have had many relationships prior to their current one can compare a present partner to their prior partners in many areas — like conflict management, dating style, physical attractiveness, sexual skills, communication ability, and so on. Marriage involves leaving behind other options, which may be harder to do with a lot of experience.

So the problem with too much prior experience is that it lessens your commitment to your current marriage which, in their model, makes you less successful.

But -- and this is a huge qualification -- the only way the authors have of determining who is in a "high quality marriage" is by asking people to evaluate their own circumstances. What they are measuring is not really how good these marriages are, but how likely the people in them are to say they are good. What if all the variables they measure affect, not how good things really are, but how determined people are to put a positive spin on them? Could it be that all their machinery of commitment really only increases people's determination to say things are great?

Here's another thing.This study has only run for five years, so none of these people have bee married for very long. So maybe the ones who say their marriages are great are the ones who are still in that first flush of powerful romantic love. And maybe people with more experience are less likely to report high satisfaction because they have felt those feelings before, and then felt them fade. So maybe more experienced people are just better able to see through the hormonal rush and be realistic about the state of the relationship.

And yet, as I have said many times, I firmly believe that thinking positively helps in life. Certainly I find that it helps me -- when I am down, counting my blessings helps pull me out of it. Thinking about this study I get the sense that happiness can be maintained only by a desperate effort toward cheerfulness -- that things as they are, are really rather grim, and only constantly telling ourselves to be positive can keep us feeling good about them. Sort of like those cartoons in which Wiley Coyote keeps running through the air for a while until he notices he is in the air, at which point he falls to the ground. But then again maybe I just take pop sociology too seriously.