What Young Adults Need To Know About Marriage

David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University have released a list of ten research findings on marriage and courtship. For a list of the research sources supporting these ten points, you can visit their website at http://marriage.rutgers.edu.

1. Teen Marriage. Marrying as a teenager is the highest known risk factor for divorce. People who marry in their teens are two to three times more likely to divorce than people who marry in their twenties or older.

2. Finding a partner. Sixty percent of married people were introduced by family, friends, co-workers or other acquaintances. Despite the romantic notion that people meet and fall in love through chance or fate, social networks are important in bringing together individuals of similar interests and backgrounds.

3. Common backgrounds. The more similar people are in their values, backgrounds, life goals, and when they share similar social networks, the more likely they are to have a successful marriage. Opposites may attract but they may not live together harmoniously as married couples.

4. Out-of-wedlock children. Women have a significantly better chance of marrying if they do not become single parents before marrying. Having a child out of wedlock reduces the chances of ever marrying. Despite the growing numbers of potential marriage partners with children, one study concludes "having children is still one of the least desirable characteristics a potential marriage partner can possess."

The only partner characteristic men and women rank as even less desirable than having children is the inability to hold a steady job.

5. Education and marriage. Both women and men who are college educated are more likely to marry, and less likely to divorce, than people with lower levels of education. College educated women's chances of marrying are better than less well-educated women. However, the growing gender gap in college education may make it more difficult for college women to find similarly well-educated men in the future. This is already a problem for African-American female college graduates, who greatly outnumber African-American male college graduates.

6. Cohabitation and marriage problems. Living together before marriage has not proved useful as a "trial marriage." People who have multiple cohabiting relationships before marriage are more likely to experience marital conflict, marital unhappiness and eventual divorce than people who do not cohabit before marriage.

Researchers attribute some but not all of these differences to the differing characteristics of people who cohabit, the so-called "selection effect," rather than to the experience of cohabiting itself. According to one recent study of couples who were married between 1981 and 1997, the negative effects persist. This supports the view that the cohabitation experience itself contributes to problems in marriage.

7. Marriage and money. Marriage helps people to generate income and wealth. Compared to those who merely live together, people who marry become economically better off. Men become more productive after marriage; they earn between ten and forty percent more than do single men with similar education and job histories.

Marital social norms that encourage healthy, productive behavior and wealth accumulation play a role. Some of the greater wealth of married couples results from their more efficient specialization and pooling of resources, and because they save more.

Married people also receive more money from family members than the unmarried (including cohabiting couples), probably because families consider marriage more permanent and more binding than a living-together union.

8. Marriage and satisfying sex. People who are married are more likely to have emotionally and physically satisfying sex lives than single people or those who just live together. Contrary to the popular belief that married sex is boring and infrequent, married people report higher levels of sexual satisfaction than both sexually active singles and cohabiting couples.

Forty-two percent of wives said that they found sex extremely emotionally and physically satisfying, compared to just 31 percent of single women who had a sex partner. Forty eight percent of husbands said sex was extremely satisfying emotionally, compared to just 37 percent of cohabiting men.

The higher level of commitment in marriage is probably the reason for the high level of reported sexual satisfaction. Marital commitment contributes to a greater sense of trust and security, less drug and alcohol-infused sex, and more mutual communication between the couple.

9. Impact of parental divorce. People who grow up in a family broken by divorce are slightly less likely to marry, and much more likely to divorce when they do marry. According to one study the divorce risk nearly triples if one marries someone who also comes from a broken home. The increased risk is much lower, however, if the marital partner is someone who grew up in a happy, intact family.

10. Marriages that last. For large segments of the population, the risk of divorce is far below fifty percent. The risk of divorce is far below fifty percent for educated people going into their first marriage. The risk of divorce is even lower still for people who wait to marry at least until their mid-twenties, haven't lived with many different partners prior to marriage, or are strongly religious and marry someone of the same faith.