[disallusioned42]

This is a fascinating topic to me. I read it with great interest, and I might even go and do a bunch of my own analysis of the data. But I can't help but think that in a way the whole thing deeply misses the point. My skepticism started when I got to the third point: "How often you go to church". The results seem obvious to me. In general, churches frown on divorce, so of course church goers are going to have lower divorce rates! But that's irrelevant if the result is that a bunch of people are miserable because they're staying in marriages that make them unhappy. I used to be a regular church goer and I absolutely saw this. People would stay in miserable marriages because they thought it was the right thing to do.

So I hypothesize that what really matters is not divorce rate, but happy marriage rate. Unfortunately that data is not in this study. And furthermore, if it was, I would suspect significant bias. In the church world that I was a part of there was significant pressure to keep up appearances. So I don't think you would be able to trust either the married persons' self assessment of happiness nor the external assessment of the people who know them.

With this new metric in mind, I went back and re-thought the logic in each of the OP's significant predictors. First stop, "How much money you make". IMO this one falls flat on its face. It's easy to imagine situations where someone would stay in an unhappy marriage just because their partner has money. It's also easy to imagine situations where someone makes a lot of money, but stays in an unhappy marriage because their partner would get half of it in a divorce. Another factor that I think is suspect is "How many people attended the wedding". When a lot of people saw you get married it seems like there might be more pressure to stay in an unhappy marriage to save face to all the people who attended your wedding. I'm a little bit less confident about the reasoning here, but it still seems plausible.

The rest of the predictors seem reasonable to me, especially "How long you were dating". This one stands up under the happiness test and just seems to make sense, provided that the extended dating years were as similar as possible to the married years, minus the marriage license.

[doorhammer]

I think the data is a fascinating point for lively conversation and conjecture as long as you understand that you can only draw so much so much in the way of specific causation from it.

I didn't look at the raw data, but it also seems like some of the info might be inherently linked. Eloping might imply you don't regularly attend church, or if you do that you're marrying outside the church consent. Regularly attending church can bring with it a relatively stable set of defaults to invite to a wedding. A large attendee list also might imply affluence, or having taken longer to plan the wedding, implying a longer pre-marriage relationship. All just flippant conjecture, of course, but interesting.

I wonder if there's anything in the data you could use as a sort of halfway proxy for whatever you'd consider a 'happy' or contented relationship.

I grew up in a church environment as well, and I saw my share of marriages held together by social pressure, but I also wonder if some of the other marriages are better because a lot of people I knew very much had the idea that "this is forever, so I don't even have to think about it anymore." It wasn't even a point of consideration anymore. I wonder if that can relieve some level of psychological stress in a marriage that's not absolute Perfect, but pretty decent, instead of wondering if you missed some distorted version of "the one". (again more conjecture)

[Periodic]

It is possible to do these analyses and isolate a single variable regardless of the correlations with other variables. I'm hoping they did this but their methods section does not seem to indicate that they did.

They have a very large variable space (one variable per question) and they want to reduce that to the ones that are actually interesting. Hopefully they did some sort of dimensionality reduction to find the important variables, and I expect a lot of those new dimensions were comprised of many variables, for example, wealth and money spent on wedding are probably correlated.

[kaitai]

I think a lot of these metrics are really proxies for social support. Belonging to a church, having 200+ people attend your cheap wedding -- these are situations in which you know a lot of people, who might be helpful to you when the marriage gets tough. You can talk to your grandma about the three years in which she really wanted to divorce grandpa, but they stuck it out and things got much better when x happened. You can call your cousin and ask him if he can take the kids for the evening because your wife is sick and you can't deal with everyone and everything at once. You can borrow a car from your fellow choir member, or you can vent about your relationship stress or how you hate your kids that week.

Social supports smooth out money problems, health problems, and relationship problems. Money+health problems are the number one cause of divorce in America (that is, money discussions are the number one marriage stressor in the US, and health problems are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US). If your parents/church/friends/cousins can help out with a loan/childcare/outright monetary gifts when certain economic or health sh&t goes down, your marriage is more likely to survive. That's not even counting emotional support and feelings-conversations.

[linguafranca]

From my experience, the happiest marriages are of people who don't just "go" to church, but actually try to "live" their church's teachings in all areas of their lives. Churches usually promote selflessness, sacrifice, honesty, gentleness, and sincere love. So it's a recipe for happiness inside or out of marriage, but especially inside marriage.

[michaelsbradley]

And some churches have particularly well-developed theologies of marriage and family. See, for example, Pope St. John Paul II's apostolic exhortation Familias Consortio and its many church-teaching references (and, in turn, their references and so on).

http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2famil.htm

[disallusioned42]

For the record, I did that. And from the inside it appeared to work. For years I thought I was happy and had a fantastic marriage. But it still didn't prevent us from ultimately coming to the conclusion that staying married was not the best thing for either of us. Now I'm agnostic and MUCH happier.

[gus_massa]

YMMV. Other churches promote killing everyone that don't believe in the same god, or believe in the same god but have a method to pray, or has other social habits.

I think that it's not a problem of a specific religion. Most religion has peaceful periods but 300 years later the "same" religion has a violent period and 300 year later the "same" religion is peaceful again, ...

And sometimes, some members of the same church are peaceful and some are violent. It's more complicated.

[scott_karana]

Churches/religions can condone violence to others while still promoting healthy marriage, so your point doesn't necessarily mean anything about the topic at hand.

(Obviously, your point is important in a larger context. :)

[okaram]

The problem is that happiness in a marriage varies heavily over time, and has lots of ups-and-downs.

I think a big thing that commitment devices (religion, family ...) help with is that when the going gets touch for a little while, you stay together, which is usually good in the long run.

If your marriage sucks for several years, or if there's abuse, then breaking it may be OK; but many of the issues you discard would also signal people not committed, and marriages breaking because they suck for a couple of months.

[disallusioned42]

Yes, I agree that commitment has value. But the standard view promulgated my many religions (and expressed in some of the comments here) that marriage should be almost non-negotiably for life takes this WAY too far. I don't know where the balance is, but I am positive that it is nowhere near where tradition places it.

[baddox]

> But the standard view promulgated my many religions (and expressed in some of the comments here) that marriage should be almost non-negotiably for life takes this WAY too far.

It depends on what you think is the purpose of marriage. The traditional view you're questioning is that marriage is a very serious contract that is never to be broken (usually with a few exceptions, like infidelity or abuse). I suspect this view is historically an economic device for raising children: the woman raises children while the man provides for the family (please note, I'm making no normative argument for these roles). Monogamy is obviously historically useful for ensuring paternity, and there's obvious selective pressure for that norm to arise (although I've seen studies claiming that humans have always tended to practice punctuated monogamy).

These days, that view of marriage is less vital in the Western world (at least the economic part), but it still has a lot of cultural momentum. Aside from that, the only modern purpose of official marriage is legal benefits: taxes, wills, medical discretion, child custody, etc. Apart from those, I see little difference in a "marriage" and simple long-term cohabitation other than the notion that the former is a life-long commitment.

[mgbmtl]

On the "cultural momentum" of marriage, it varies a lot from one region to the other. For example in Canada, between Ontario and Quebec (in Canada), these 2009 stats are pretty interesting: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/84f0210x/2009000/t006-eng.htm

In short, in Quebec today, less than half of kids born are from non-married parents. Marriage is seen by many as irrelevant, bureaucratic, peer-pressure consumerist obligation. According to QC civil law, once a couple has a kid, they have the same legal obligations to the kid as a married couple (i.e. contributing to supporting the kid in a way proportional to their revenue/salary). As the tacky government slogans like to remind us.. "in a couple one day, parents always" i.e. marriage has little relevance.

[baddox]

I think you mean that in Quebec more than half of kids born are from non-married parents.

[mgbmtl]

erm, yes :)

[baddox]

Notice that the article isn't even claiming anything about "happy" marriages. The article is solely about divorce rates. It's not "missing the point," you're just looking for a point that the author of this article never intended to make.

[disallusioned42]

The article's title is "What makes for a stable marriage?". I think most reasonable people would agree that lack of divorce does not make "a stable marriage", so yes, the article is missing the point as declared by its title. Can I construct definitions for all these things that make the article self-consistent? Sure. But that's not very useful in the real world, which is what I mean by "missing the point".

[baddox]

I guess I'm either an unreasonable person, or in the minority of reasonable people. To me, "stable" does not imply happy; it merely means unlikely to change or collapse. A "stable building," for example, would be one that is structurally sound, not one that houses wholesome activities or makes people happy.

Also, just look at every single chart and data point mentioned in the article. All are about one dependent variable: divorce rate. Even if there is room for reasonable disagreement about the implications of the word "stable," reading the article makes it abundantly clear which definition was intended.

[disallusioned42]

I'm assuming that most people are more interested in happy marriages than stable ones (at least before they've made the commitment). Now the marriage traditionalists might not. (This seems to be supported by at least one or two of the people posting here. But at the same time, one of them still mentions "happily-ever-after".) Even going back to the Declaration of Independence we see "pursuit of happiness" mentioned prominently in even those much more conservative times. Going significantly farther back than that I can start to see how "stable" might be significant, but in this day and age "happy" seems like a safe bet.

On the other side we have the word "divorce", which everyone agrees means "definitely unhappy". However, "not divorced" is definitely not a sufficient condition for "happy". The word "stable" is in the middle and can go either way. In one sense I agree it has a strong similarity to "not divorced". But in another sense, I think a lot of people read "stable marriage" as being very similar to "happy marriage". So to the extent that stable == happy, it's missing the point of the actual stats. And to the extent that stable != happy and a good proxy for not divorced, it's missing the point of what people really want out of life (and marriage).

This brings us to your response to my other comment, and there I think you're right on the money. The purpose of marriage is the main issue here. In my mind, the traditional view is synonymous with "stable" and not getting divorced. And the fact that the OP is talking about "stable" and "divorce" in the way it is suggests that the traditional view of marriage is a strong influence (although maybe my religious background is biasing me here). But none of this is very relevant if "happy" is what people are really after.

[baddox]

> I'm assuming that most people are more interested in happy marriages than stable ones (at least before they've made the commitment).

That's a very reasonable assumption. But it's also reasonable to analyse divorce rate data. You can't just assume that anyone studying marriage will only be studying how to keep marriages happy. I don't see any claim that this study is the ultimate study on marriage.

[genwin]

Focus on divorce rate rather than happy marriage rate (I like that term!) describes pretty much every article on what makes a successful marriage.

[ChiperSoft]

Also people who stay together for their kids.

[disallusioned42]

Yeah, that's definitely a common reason. But I actually feel that it's one of the worst ones, and that kids would be much better off if the parents calmly explaining their decision to the kids in a positive way, thereby sparing them the pain, conflict, and at the very least unhapiness that staying together would likely bring.

[Mz]

Some kids need two parents more than others. My ex and I stayed together as long as we did in part "for the kids." He physically moved out about a month before our oldest turned 18. I think we did the right thing. I have health problems and two special needs sons. My oldest was quite challenging to raise. I have reason to believe that divorcing sooner would have been catastrophic and potentially deadly for one or more of us.

Since you cannot a/b test this in individual cases and can only say "people who left earlier have these corresponding average experiences or outcomes compared to people who stayed longer," I think it's a terrible disservice to many people with big life challenges to act like they were just being neurotic to stay as they long as they did.

[disallusioned42]

My comment is intended to be taken broadly on average. Based on what you say here, I would agree with you that staying married might have been a better choice in your specific situation.

[tjradcliffe]

Anyone thinking about "staying together for their kids" should talk to people whose parents divorced and ask them, "Were you happier before or after your parents split?" Cases vary, but the people I've had that conversation with have all said their parent's divorce was a relief.

I know there are people who claim "divorce as such" is bad for kids but I'm very doubtful about that. Divorce can be good or bad depending on how it's done, and how interested both the parents are in their kid's well-being.

[ScottBurson]

My opinion -- as someone whose parents divorced when I was 5 -- is that merely staying together and being miserable isn't necessarily an improvement on divorcing, but getting into couples therapy and working through your issues is vastly better, for your kids as well as for you, than either a miserable marriage or an acrimonious divorce.