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Choosing a Marriage Partner: The Facts
Research findings on choosing a marriage partner:
David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead
1. 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. The most likely way to find a future marriage partner is through an introduction by family, friends, or acquaintances.
Despite the romantic notion that people meet and fall in love through chance or fate, the evidence suggests that social networks are important in bringing together individuals of similar interests and backgrounds, especially when it comes to selecting a marriage partner. According to a large-scale national survey of sexuality, almost 60 per cent of married people were introduced by family, friends, co-workers or other acquaintances.
3. The more similar people are in their values, backgrounds and life goals, the more likely they are to have a successful marriage.
Opposites may attract but they may not live together harmoniously as married couples. People who share common backgrounds and similar social networks are better suited as marriage partners than people who are very different in their backgrounds and networks.
4. 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 noted, ‘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. Both women and men who are university educated are more likely to marry, and less likely to divorce, than people with lower levels of education.
Despite occasional news stories predicting lifelong singlehood for college-educated women, these predictions have proven false. Though the first generation of college educated women (those who earned baccalaureate degrees in the 1920s) married less frequently than their less well-educated peers, the reverse is true today. College (University) educated women's chances of marrying are better than less well-educated women. However, the growing gender gap in tertiary education may make it more difficult for University educated women to find similarly well-educated men in the future.
6. 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. It has been hypothesized that the negative effects of cohabitation on future marital success may diminish as living together becomes a common experience among today's young adults. However, according to one recent study of couples who were married between 1981 and 1997, the negative effects persist among younger cohorts, supporting the view that the cohabitation experience itself contributes to problems in marriage.
7. 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 per cent 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. People who are married are more likely to have emotionally and physically satisfying sex lives than single people or those who 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, according to the most comprehensive and recent survey of sexuality. Forty-two per cent of wives said that they found sex extremely emotionally and physically satisfying, compared to just 31 per cent of single women who had a sex partner. And 48 per cent of husbands said sex was extremely satisfying emotionally, compared to just 37 per cent 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. 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. For large segments of the population, the risk of divorce is far below 50 per cent.
Although the overall divorce rate in
David Popenoe PhD and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead PhD are the co-directors of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers, the
Research Sources
1. Teenage marriage and divorce
Depending on how the age categories are delineated and the length of the time period covered after marriage, teenage marriages have been found to be from two to three times more likely to end in divorce compared to marriages at older ages. See T. C. Martin and L. Bumpass "Recent Trends in Marital Disruption," Demography 26 (1989): 37-5. A recent government study found that 59 per cent of marriages for women under age 18 end in divorce or separation within 15 years, compared with 36 per cent of those married at age 20 or older.
2. Finding a marriage partner
Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994) pp. 234-5.
3. People of similar backgrounds
Finnegan Alford-Cooper, For Keeps: Marriages that Last a Lifetime (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, The Good Marriage (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); Jeffry H. Larson and Thomas B. Holman, "Premarital Predictors of Marital Quality and Stability," Family Relations 43 (1994): 228-237; Robert Lauer and Jeanette Lauer, "Factors in Long-Term Marriage," Journal of Family Issues 7:4 (1986): 382-390.
4. Single parents and marriage
Gayle Kaufman and Frances Goldscheider, "Willingness to Stepparent: Attitudes Toward Partners Who Already Have Children," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, 2003. Available at (http://www.asanet.org/convention/2003/program.html).
5. College education and marriage
Joshua R. Goldstein and Catharine T. Kenney, "Marriage Delayed or Marriage Forgone? New Cohort Forecasts of First Marriage for
6. Cohabitation as trial marriage
See discussion in Claire M. Kamp Dush, Catherine L. Cohan, and Paul R. Amato, "The Relationship between Cohabitation and Marital Quality and Stability: Change Across Cohorts?" Journal of Marriage and the Family 65 (August 2003): 539-49. For a comprehensive review of the research on the relationship between cohabitation and risk of marital disruption, see David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Should We Live Together?, 2nd Ed. (
7. Marriage and wealth
Thomas A. Hirschl, Joyce Altobelli, and Mark R. Rank, "Does Marriage Increase the Odds of Affluence? Exploring the Life Course Probabilities," Journal of Marriage and the Family 65-4 (2003): 927-938; Lingxin Hao, "Family Structure, Private Transfers, and the Economic Well-Being of Families with Children," Social Forces 75 (1996): 269-292; Jeffrey S. Gray and Michael J. Vanderhart, "The Determination of Wages: Does Marriage Matter?," in Linda Waite, et. al. (eds.) The Ties that Bind: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation (
8. Marriage and sex
Linda J. Waite and Kara Joyner, "Emotional and Physical Satisfaction with Sex in Married, Cohabiting, and Dating Sexual Unions: Do Men and Women Differ?," in E. O. Laumann and R. T. Michael (eds.), Sex, Love and Health in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 239-269; Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
9. People from broken homes
Jay D. Teachman, "The Childhood Living Arrangements of Children and the Characteristics of Their Marriages," Journal of Family Issues 25-1 (2004): 86-111. One study found that when the wife alone had experienced a parental divorce, the odds of divorce increased by more than half (59 per cent), but when both spouses experienced parental divorce, the odds of divorce nearly tripled (189 per cent). Paul R. Amato, "Explaining the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce," Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (August, 1996): 628-640. Another study suggests that the main reason people who experience a parental divorce have a higher divorce rate themselves is because they tend to hold a comparatively weak commitment to the norm of lifelong marriage. Paul R. Amato and Danelle D. DeBoer, "The Transmission of Marital Instability Across Generations: Relationship Skills or Commitment to Marriage?" Journal of Marriage and the Family 63 (November, 2001): 1038-1051. Research on mate selection and marital success is reviewed in Jeffry H. Larson and Thomas B. Holman, "Premarital Predictors of Marital Quality and Stability," Family Relations 43 (1994): 228-237. On the lower marriage rate of the children of divorce, see Nicholas H. Wolfinger, "Parental Divorce and Offspring Marriage: Early or Late?" Social Forces (September, 2003): 337-353.
10. The risk of divorce
Some primary sources for the risk factors associated with divorce and the divorce rate trend are Jay D. Teachman, "Stability Across Cohorts in Divorce Risk Factors," Demography 39 (2002): 331-351; Tim B. Heaton, "Factors Contributing to Increasing Marital Stability in the United States," Journal of Family Issues 23-3 (April, 2002): 392-409; For a review of research, see Jeffry H. Larson and Thomas B. Holman, "Premarital Predictors of Marital Quality and Stability," Family Relations 43 (1994): 228-237.
