Premarital Relationship Correlates of the Erosion of Satisfaction in Marriage

Abstract

The results of the present study show that premarital conflict is a precursor of marital conflict and that, while it does not relate to the feelings that partners report having about one another premaritally, it does predict the extent to which they are satisfied once they have been married about two and a half years. Twenty-one newlyweds provided detailed time-ordered descriptions of their courtships, dividing them into three stages of involvement - casual dating, serious dating, and commitment to marriage. With the events of the courtship fresh in their minds, they were asked to think about the time period of each stage in turn, and to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure: (1) love, (2) ambivalence, (3) conflict and (4) maintenance behaviours (e.g., attempts at problem-solving). Approximately two years later they completed the same scales, as well as a measure of marital satisfaction and adjustment. Premarital conflict was generally the strongest predictor of patterns of marital involvement, but it predicted the subjective feelings of wives better than of husbands. Conflict and maintenance are strongly associated premaritally, but once couples have been married for a while there is no tendency for couples who have high conflict to make greater efforts at problem-solving. The results are discussed in terms of couples' changing attributions regarding the origins of conflict.