Marriage and Health

Since Karen and I are celebrating 45 years of marriage, I have been thinking about the challenges and benefits of long marriages, and there are many. Married people live longer and better than singles. The benefits of long marriages are vast and numerous and all researchers, even those who are philosophically against marriage, agree.

The ways to prevent divorce are simple but not easy. Two scholars have recently written about keeping a marriage going strong for decades.

What Factors are Associated with Divorce and/or Marital Unhappiness?

The list contains those thing that have been found by many researchers to increase the odds of experiencing unhappiness and divorce.

Factors THAT ARE HARD TO CHANGE ONCE MARRIED (Static Risk Factors)

1. Having a personality tendency to react strongly or defensively to problems and disappointments
   Having divorced parents
   Living together prior to marriage
   Being previously divorced, yourself or your partner
   Having children from a previous marriage
   Having different religious backgrounds
   Marrying at a very young age (for example, at the age of 18 or 19; the average these days is about 25 or 26 years of age for first marriages).
   Knowing each other only for a short time before marriage
   Experiencing financial hardship
   
2. Factors that you can change, to improve your odds, (Dynamic risk)
   Negative styles of talking and fighting with each other, like arguments that rapidly become negative, put downs, and the silent treatment
   Difficulty communicating well, especially when you disagree
   Trouble handling disagreements as a team
   Unrealistic beliefs about marriage
   Having different attitudes about important things
   A low level of commitment to one another, reflected in such things as not protecting your relationship from others you are attracted to, or failing to view your marriage as a long term investment
   

Compiled by Drs. Scott Stanley and Howard Markman
University of Denver