Marital Success Research Articles

Building the Marital Muscle Groups

Marriage enrichment is a wellness-based approach to strengthening key areas of marital success. This article develops the metaphor of marital muscle groups and integrates Adlerian theories of development and personality with Gottman’s behavioral approach to provide a model of enrichment that can be applied in a clinical setting. A case example illustrates the application of the approach.

Understanding the Experiences of Husbands in Step-Couples

The literature on stepfamily functioning pays far more attention to issues of stepparenting than issues of marital success. However, the marital bond is equally important to support stepparenting success and provide the couple with a solid foundation for the family once the stepchildren have departed. To date, any literature concerning stepfamily marriage seems concentrated on the experience of wives in stepfamilies, relegating the experiences of husbands to an afterthought. In an attempt to redress this oversight, this article provides insights into the challenges facing husbands in stepfamilies, with implications for clinicians seeking to strengthen the marital relationship in stepfamilies.

The Dilemmas of Monogamy: Pleasure, Discipline and the Pentecostal Moral Self in the Republic of Benin

Based on ethnographic research in the Republic of Benin, this article explores how Pentecostal teachings on marriage and the management of sexual pleasure contribute to shaping converts’ moral selves. For Pentecostals, fidelity towards God, when single and fidelity between partners, once married, is presented as the ideal model of partnership to which every “Born-Again” should aspire. In the context where polygamous unions are socially accepted, Pentecostal pastors teach that a satisfactory sexual life restricted to marriage is the means of building successful monogamous unions. However, sexual satisfaction might not always guarantee marital success, especially when people face problems of infertility. The author suggests that the disciplinary regimes that these teachings promote contribute to shaping new modes of intimacy, which are compatible with societal changes but often contradict the extant social norms and ideals of reproduction. Moral dilemmas arising from this tension are the key to understanding how Pentecostal Christianity shapes the moral self. The article addresses how Pentecostals in Benin navigate and negotiate cultural continuities and discontinuities in relation to church authority and family life.

Pathways to a Stable Union? Pregnancy and Childbearing Among Cohabiting and Married Couples

This study analyzes the stability of cohabiting and marital unions following a first birth. But unlike previous research, it compares the subsequent trajectories of unions that began with a pregnancy to those in which conceptions came after coresidence. The U.S. data from the 2006–2010 and 2011–2013 cross-sectional files of the National Survey of Family Growth indicate that roughly 1-in-5 first births were associated with rapid transitions from conception into either cohabitation or marriage. Moving in together following a pregnancy—especially an unintended one—is unlikely to lead to marital success or union stability. Compared with marital unions, dissolution rates following birth were particularly high for couples who entered a cohabiting union following conception. Only a small minority of these couples married (i.e., less than one-third), and these marriages experienced high dissolution rates. The results also suggest that the most committed cohabiting couples got married after finding themselves pregnant, leaving behind the most dissolution-prone cohabiting couples. The American family system is being transformed by newly emerging patterns of fertility among cohabiting couples.

Developmental Idealism, Body Weight and Shape, and Marriage Entry in Transitional China.

New trends toward later and less marriage are emerging in post-reform China. Previous research has examined the changing individual-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics shaping marriage entry in Chinese adults. Employing a cultural model known as developmental idealism (DI), this study argues that a new worldview specifying an ideal body type has become popular in the West and that this new worldview has been exported to China. This new part of the DI package is likely stratified by gender, has a stronger impact on women than on men, and has likely penetrated urban areas more than rural areas. Drawing on the 1991-2009 longitudinal data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, this study employs discrete-time logit models to estimate the relationships between various body types and transition to first marriage in Chinese young adults 18-30 years old. Body weight status and body shape are measured by body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), respectively, and further divided into categories of underweight, normal, and obese. Regression results indicate that larger values of BMI and WHR were associated with delayed entry into first marriage in urban women, whereas being overweight or obese was associated with accelerated transition to first marriage in rural men. Not only were these associations statistically significant, but their strengths were substantively remarkable. Findings from this study suggest that both body weight and body shape have important implications for marital success, independent of individual-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, and contribute to evolving gender and rural-urban disparities, as China is undergoing a rapid nutrition transition.

Sources of Marital Conflict in Five Cultures

This analysis of previously collected data examined four fitness-relevant issues for their possible role in marital conflict. These were sex, finances, division of labor, and raising children, selected in light of their pertinence to sex differences in reproductive strategies. Over 2,000 couples in five diverse cultures were studied. Marital conflict was assessed by the Problems with Partner scale, which was previously shown to demonstrate measurement invariance across cultures and genders. All four issues were significantly related to perceived marital problems in almost all cases. Thus, conflict tended to arise around issues relevant to reproductive strategies. A few cultural idiosyncrasies emerged and are discussed. In all cultures, wives reported more problems than husbands. Another important issue was kindness. The results suggest that a key factor in marital success or failure may be kindness necessary to sustain this prolonged and intimate relationship of cooperation for raising one's offspring.

Shared Reality and Grounded Feelings During Courtship: Do They Matter for Marital Success?

This study provides evidence that newlywed pairs who have a shared and well‐grounded understanding of their courtship are better able to establish unions that endure. Using a sample of 168 couples, the authors found that marriages were more likely to survive when courting partners (a) loved each other to a similar degree, (b) depicted the probability of marriage and changes in the likelihood of marriage in a corresponding fashion over the course of their courtship, and (c) portrayed the courtship as escalating from a low (25%) to a high (75%) probability of marriage as spanning a comparable period of time. The durability of marriages was reflected, as well, in how solidly courting partners' feelings for each other were interwoven with their courtship experiences. More specifically, courtship difficulties were not as associated with weakened feelings of love or with heightened feelings of ambivalence among couples who later divorced as compared to those who stayed married.

Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth‐Century United States. KristinCelello. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. Kristin Celello. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Kristin Celello's Making Marriage Work is a noteworthy addition to a growing field of historical scholarship on American marriage. Whereas its extended title suggests a broad study of the institutions of and divorce, the book focuses more narrowly on the messages that a set of twentieth-century marital conveyed to the public about the paths to matrimonial success. Celello examines advice literature, film, fiction, and television and radio broadcasts to identify these marital prescriptions. Through her meticulous investigation of experts' advice, she argues that while the messengers changed through the decades, their underlying message remained the same: a successful requires hard and personal sacrifice, particularly on the part of women. From University of North Carolina sociologist Ernest Groves's 1930s college courses in marriage, to relationship therapist John Gray's 1992 bestseller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, experts have encouraged wives to commit themselves to maintaining healthy marriages, with or without the participation of their husbands. Whereas many have embraced this marriage as work formula as a piece of timeless wisdom, the idea of marital did not emerge until the early twentieth century. Concerned about rising divorce rates and the growing tendency among white, middle-class women to delay marriage, reformers like Groves sought to deflect what they perceived to be a marriage crisis. The 1920s and '30s witnessed the development of a lucrative counseling industry, which warned of the damages that divorce inflicted upon families. Early experts popularized the belief that marital success required outside aid; they simultaneously suggested that couples not pursuing help from counselors, advice columns, and manuals were less invested in their nuptials than those who utilized such tools. Although many of these self-proclaimed experts lacked the academic credentials that they claimed, their repeated assertions about the necessity of marital encouraged husbands, but especially wives, to strive for matrimonial bliss in subsequent decades. Experts pushed newlywed World War II-era wives to devote themselves to their vows, whereas their husbands served in the military, and to preserve marital harmony once their husbands returned from combat. A decade later, experts informed women of their continued responsibility to promote their families' physical and psychological well being, encouraging disenchanted housewives to endure abuse, infidelity, and alcoholism in the name of familial unity. …

Seven Rules on Having a Happy Marriage Along With Work

In modern society, men and women want to have a successful marriage and a career. However, people are faced with new demands at work and home, and therefore, finding a balance between work and family life is a real challenge. In this article, the data consist of stories written by Finns who have been married for more than 10 years ( N = 342 married couples) and who were able to combine demanding work and family lives. In voluntary statements, the respondents discussed the factors that explain the stability and happiness of their marriages. Stories were analyzed with inductive content analysis and qualitative categorizing. Seven rules of personal behavior as the resolutions of having a good marriage along with work were found as results. The results show that none of the couples had avoided difficulties; instead, the couples had created personal models of interaction that could be seen as the secret of their marital success.

More Careful or Less Marriageable? Parental Divorce, Spouse Selection and Entry into Marriage

Despite the large literature on the long-term effects of parental divorce, few studies have analyzed the effects of parental divorce on spouse selection behavior. However, the characteristics of one's spouse can have important effects on economic well-being and on marital success. We use discrete-time, event-history data from Finnish population registers to study the effects of parental divorce on entry into marriage with spouses who have different educational qualifications (both absolute and relative to one's own education), using conditional multinomial logistic regression models. The results show that Finnish children of divorce have lower rates of marriage than those from intact families. In particular, children of divorce have a lower likelihood of marrying spouses with secondary education or more, and especially low rates of marrying someone with a tertiary degree. The latter gap is smaller among those with tertiary education, as a result of the higher rates of homogamous marriage among the children of divorce with high education. Our findings suggest that children of divorce carry with them traits and behaviors that make them less marriageable candidates in the marriage market. We discuss the possible implications of these findings.

The Successful Combination of Work and Family in Finland: The Ability to Compromise as a Key Factor

This article focuses on the success at work from the family’s point of view. This article is based on two researches in Finland: one that concentrated on marital success (N= 342 married couples) and the other one in which the employees of the year (N=8) described their solutions to combine work and family successfully. By uniting these two perspectives, the purpose is to give a unique description of how both the family and work roles can be combined in order to enhance succeeding both at work and in family life. This article answers to the following questions: 1) In what way is it possible to combine work and family successfully? 1.1) according to the long and happily married couples? 1.2) according to the employees of the year? Based on these researches, the ability to compromise satisfactorily was the linking factor between these life dimensions. The participants that had succeeded at work and in family life had found a balance between work and family satisfying to both of the spouses. This article is of topical concern as the current tendency of the demands on effectiveness and development at work due to changes in work life have been increasing and at the same time, the family values are becoming more and more appreciated.

Taller indian women are more successful at the marriage market

Whereas being tall has consistently been found a favorable characteristic at the marriage market for men, much less is known about the association between stature and marital success among women. Taller women are healthier than shorter women, give birth more easily and their offspring are healthier. We therefore would expect them to be more successful at the marriage market. However, existing evidence is mixed. We study the association between women's height and the odds of being married, marrying young, experiencing a divorce, and becoming widowed, and the association between women's height and their husbands' educational attainment and occupational status. Data come from the Indian National Family Health Survey 2005-2006, a representative study among 124,385 women and 74,369 men in all Indian states. Effects of female height on being married, marrying young, divorce, widowhood, and husband's occupation were estimated using logistic regression models. Effects of female height on husband's education were estimated using OLS regression models. Woman's education and age were always taken into account. Where possible controls for husband's height, husband's education, and age at marriage were included. Positive effects of women's height on favorable marital outcomes were found. Taller than average women are more likely to marry, get higher educated husbands with better jobs and are less likely to marry at a very young age or to lose their husbands through divorce or premature death. Taller Indian women seem to be more successful at the marriage market.

A few variables of influence in the concept of marital satisfaction

Studies about marital satisfaction have a long history but we still don’t have a solution to assure marital success, and the proof is the high rate of divorces, in our days. In this incipient study, we assume that low self-esteem, unhappy partners and difficult negotiations in couple, influences the perception of marital satisfaction, regardless of relationship duration. The conclusions was that satisfaction or dissatisfaction does not depend on years spent in a marital relationship, that other elements like good self-esteem, ability to communicate in a couple, could help building and maintain a fulfilling marital life.

Mating by proxy: a novel perspective to donor conception

How single, partnered lesbian, and partnered heterosexual women undertaking donor insemination rate the importance of donor characteristics is explored in the context of Trivers's parental investment theory. Consistent with this theory, single women placed higher value on biographical traits reflective of the donor's level of potential resources (occupation, hobbies, age) and good character compared with either partnered lesbian or heterosexual women.

Special Section: International Issues in Clinical Practice and Training

The field of systemic therapy continues to grow internationally and this expansion provides new opportunities to broaden the tradition of global connectedness. Some of the subjects being addressed by international scholars include ways to adapt and tailor existing models and practices of therapy to fit a growing global audience. Clinicians increasingly are challenged to provide culturally competent services for clients from cultures different from their own. Supervisors and educators endeavor to prepare students who come from other countries, to provide services to international clients. This Special Section on International Issues in Clinical Practice and Training takes a look at some of these issues and challenges in countries such as Iran and Uganda. Daneshpour et al. explores Iranian marriages, and the factors that contribute to successful relationships from the viewpoint happy couples in Iran. The study includes a sample of 260 couples, with in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with eleven couples married 10 years or more who scored highest on four ENRICH Couple Scales (2010). The study explores emerging themes for marital success in Iranian couples and the relationship with theories explaining martial satisfaction. Areas of investigation included marital style, prosperity, personality issues, equality, communication, conflict resolution, financial problems, leisure activities, humor & sex, family & friends, religious orientation, and child education. The authors discuss characteristics of Iranian couples with various family forms such as those with non-traditional, patriarchal, and matriarchal structures. McDowell et al. describe a novel 7-day family therapy workshop delivered in rural Uganda by a team of Ugandan and US counselors. The authors describe in thoughtful detail the preparation for collaboration, the transferability of knowledge, social justice issues, and ideas for decolonizing cross-cultural education. Topics such

Housewives' Self-esteem and their Husbands' Success: A Comparative Study among the Various Caste Groups in Pokhareli Women

This paper examines the relationship between self esteem of housewives with respect to some selected socioeconomic variables, namely; marital status, husband’s income, husband’s occupation, husband’s physical attraction, women’s own intelligence and women’s physical attraction with a sample of 240 Pokherli married women. The study compares whether the self-esteem of women and other different factors is different among the various caste groups. A comparison is also made between professional women and housewives. Self-esteem of women is signiicantly different among the various caste groups with the highest in Magar and Gurung women. Professional women are more conscious than housewives in all aspects of husband’s success. This study tests the common assertion that women, having reasonably higher income housewives experience their husbands’ success. Husbands’ success does positively affect a housewife’s self esteem, but only indirectly, through its effect on perceived marital success. Only husband’s income has a direct positive effect on self esteem, while other successes of the husband actually lower her self esteem. Since marriage is traditionally a basis for a woman’s identity, successful marriage increases her feelings of worth. However, the speciic role arrangements may reduce her feelings of personal competence. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/hjsa.v4i0.4668 Himalayan Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol.IV (2010) 61-76

"A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever"? Returns to Physical Attractiveness over the Life Course

This article analyzes the effect of three aspects of physical attractiveness (facial attractiveness, Body Mass Index and height) on socio-economic and marital success over the life course. In a sample of high school graduates from Wisconsin followed from their late teens and until their mid-60s, I find that (1. taller men have higher earnings than shorter men throughout their careers, (2. women with more attractive faces and women with lower Body Mass Index have higher socio-economic status late in their careers, (3. men and women with more attractive faces are more likely to be married in youth, and (4. men and women's physical attractiveness is unrelated to the income and socio-economic status of their spouses. These results suggest that, first, physical attractiveness matters throughout the life course, second, attractiveness does not have a large quantitative effect on socio-economic and marital outcomes and third, different aspects of physical attractiveness matter differently for men and women.

The Evolution of Eupathics: The Historical Roots of Subjective Measures of Wellbeing

This paper traces the historical roots of subjective measures of wellbeing, that is, measures designed to represent happiness, satisfaction, or other “positive” or desirable mental states. While it is often suggested that these measures are a modern invention, I argue that they have a long and rich history that conforms to Theodore M. Porter’s general account of measurement in social and behavioral science. Subjective measures emerged in marital success studies, educational psychology, and personality psychology in the 1920s and 30s, and were further shaped by the epidemiology of mental health, gerontology, and the social indicator movement in the 1960s and 70s. Consistent with Porter’s account, these measures emerged in applied rather than theoretical branches of social and behavioral science, and they did so not as a result of physics envy, but rather as a result of a moral impulse to improve society; quantification was intended to make up for perceived deficiencies in unaided human judgment; and radical disagreements about the nature of wellbeing did not impede efforts to measure it – indeed, in time, there was considerably more agreement about how to measure wellbeing than about how to define it.

Later first marriage and marital success

The research reported here used measures of marital success based on both marital survival and marital quality to assess how well first marriages entered at relatively late ages fare in comparison with those entered younger. Analysis of data from five American data sets indicated that the later marriages fare very well in survival but rather poorly in quality. The greatest indicated likelihood of being in an intact marriage of the highest quality is among those who married at ages 22–25, net of the estimated effects of time since first marriage and several variables that might commonly affect age at marriage and marital outcomes. The negative relationship beyond the early to mid-twenties between age at marriage and marital success is likely to be at least partially spurious, and thus it would be premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22–25. However, the findings do suggest that most persons have little or nothing to gain in the way of marital success by deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid-twenties.

Marriage and divorce: A genetic perspective

Marriage is considered one of the most important sources of social support that an individual receives as an adult. Although hypotheses have been formulated as to why individuals may dissolve a marriage, the determinants of marital success or failure are still relatively unknown. Behavioral geneticists have found that both marriage and divorce are, in part, genetically influenced. The goal of this research was to determine the degree of shared genetic and environmental variance between the two marital statuses. Participants were 6225 twin pairs from the Vietnam Era Twin Registry. Data were obtained on marital history, and if the individual was no longer married, how the marriage ended. Univariate analyses were performed to determine the extent of genetic and environmental influences each of the marital statues (i.e., marriage and divorce), followed by a novel bivariate analysis to test the shared variance between marriage and divorce. Results from this analysis revealed that the two different marital statuses were influenced by entirely distinct genetic and environmental factors.