I am currently reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed. It's her second book after Eat, Pray, Love, which I highly recommend. There's a reason it sold so well. It also coincided really nicely with my life.
So, in this book, she's discussing predictors of successful marriages. I know I learned this in adult dev. psych, but I forgot. These are technically correlations, and difficult to quantify, since measuring happiness is a little bit fuzzy. However, the correlations are apparently statistically significant.
Age: The divorce rate for teenage marriages is actually about 75%. So that throws off all the other marriages. Statisically, couples who marry after age 26 seem to have a much greater shot at staying married.
Education - the more educated the couple is, the better chances are. Also, a highly educated woman with a career is more likely to have a happier marriage. Eat that sexists. (This probably has very much to do with identity development and having a stronger sense of self.)
Babies - new babies put a lot of stress on a marriage. Interesting. Of course, new babies put a lot of stress on... anyone and everyone. I think that if the marriage is good, having a baby in that relationship would be actually less stressful than single parenting.
Cohabitation - it's true. Cohabitating couples pre-marriage actually have a slightly higher divorce rate.
Heterogamy - the more similar the couple in age, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely they are to see that golden anniversary.
Social integration - having a tight-knit group of pals. Buzzword: community
Religiousness - being religious has a slight advantage.
Gender Fairness - Egalitarian marriages do better than ones with stereotypical male-female roles. Perhaps because the pair can divvy up responsibilities based on skill, time, and careers rather than assigning the dude to the lawn and the lady to scrubbing the floor.
That's really interesting! I didn't know that she'd written other books after EPL (which I still need to read!).
ReplyDeleteHere's my view on marriage:
ReplyDeleteGod cheats.
Yep, he stacked the deck against us and it's just not fair.
I'll explain. He put inside desires, interpersonal desires, physical desires, emotional desires that force us to seek out another person and 'be' with that person in many ways. He slapped rules around it forcing us to continue to seek out this other person even when we're bored and don't want to. And in the end, after we've done this for a time, we begin to get a glimmer of what true, deep, and selfless love actually looks like. It's at this point that God winks at you and says "Gotcha."
So, God gets exactly what he wants, and we walk right into every single time.
God's a sly one, he is.
Adam,
ReplyDeleteI'm still working on this book and recently, I picked it up and thought: huh. this is interesting. This book is building a case for marriage without taking into account what I think can be the most beautiful and compelling part of marriage (albeit the most difficult): Christian metaphors for God, God's faithfulness, committed love, love as much more than just a snuggly feeling, love as sacrifice, and what you've mentioned above.
the book became less of a page turner after that.