The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia recently completed a study on what makes a solid marriage, and their findings align with some old-fashioned guidelines people have believed for decades. The study observed 1,000 young couples over five years and discovered four pre-marriage factors that contributed to good marriage relationships. As reported on the UK's PsyBlog, these factors are:
- The fewer pre-marriage sexual partners a person has, the more likely they are to have a happy marriage. This is contrary to conventional young-adult wisdom, but study author Galena Rhodes supposed that "more experience may increase one's awareness of alternative partners ... a strong sense of alternatives is believed to make it harder to maintain commitment to, and satisfaction with, what one already has."
- People who commit to marriage before they live together have better marriages. The study found that couples who see cohabitation as a serious commitment were more likely to be satisfied when they finally do marry.
- Couples who invite more people to their wedding tend to have happier marriages. Large, formal ceremonies were more likely to produce a high-quality marriage relationship than non-formal ceremonies. Researchers speculated the more people who witness a marriage (they recommended 150 people or more), the more seriously the couple took the commitment.
- College-educated couples who had children before marriage tended to have lower-quality marriages. Of those who got married before having a child, 44 percent went on to have high-quality marriages. But only 3 percent of those who had a child before getting married went on to be satified with their marriage relationship.
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