Premarital Relationship Length and Long-Term Marriage Success

Introduction: The Question of Courtship Length

Reading the divorce statistics today, one might almost think that a person has a better chance of winning the lottery than of staying married. This is true despite the fact that nearly everyone who gets married at least hopes that the relationship will endure. Given the rate at which marriages fail and the competing desire for individuals to have their own marriages succeed, it is vital that there be accurate research about what helps certain relationships to be successful. Such research can be used in two distinct ways by people who are thinking of getting married. First, a potential couple could assess themselves and their relationship using the criteria laid out by researchers and determine whether they more closely resemble those who have succeeded in marriage or those who have not. Second, a potential couple could examine the literature and determine whether there is anything that successful couples habitually do that they do not, and change their own behavior accordingly. In marriage, as in all other forms of human behavior, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the good form of communication.

Of course, there are an infinite number of possible variations in terms of what allows one pair of people to live together in relative harmony for fifty years while others are filing for divorce six weeks after the rehearsal dinner. There are, however, also meaningful similarities among those relationships that succeed and those that fail. This paper examines one of the factors believed to be key in assessing the probability that a marital relationship will succeed over the long term: the length of time a couple has been together before marriage. In general, the literature on this subject suggests that a short premarital relationship — one lasting three months or less — is a predictor of a higher likelihood of marital failure compared to one that springs from a longer, more established relationship. It must be emphasized that this is not true in every case, and that both individual factors (such as emotional maturity and commitment) and larger factors (such as religious beliefs and cultural understandings of marriage) play an enormous role in determining how predictive a short premarital relationship actually is.

General Attributes Predictive of a Stable Marriage

There are a range of attributes suggestive of a stable marital relationship. It should be noted that while the phrase "marital relationship" is used throughout, the same statements can generally be made about other long-term committed relationships, such as same-sex civil commitments or same-sex marriages where they are legally recognized. Some of these attributes are true — or not — of individuals, and some are true — or not — of couples as a unit. Some are under the control of the individuals concerned, and some are not.

In general, people who are involved with each other for only a short period of time before they marry — defined here as three months or less — are less likely to stay married than those who have a longer relationship before marriage. There are some exceptions to this statement, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there are limitations to it. Marriage is as much a cultural enterprise as it is an individual one — arguably more so — and thus one's expectations of the nature of the marriage contract are heavily influenced by the culture or cultures in which one was raised.

A number of cultures today have either arranged or near-arranged marriages. In such cultural systems, the people getting married generally do not know each other for a long time or intimately before they marry. In such cases, the lack of a long acquaintanceship before marriage is not necessarily predictive of a poor marital outcome. This should make intuitive sense: if one is raised with the expectation that one will marry someone whom one's family has ascertained to be an appropriate mate, and one knows that one is expected to remain in that marriage, then divorce is relatively unlikely. The marriage may also in fact be a relatively happy one. However, the focus of this paper is on American marriages, for which arranged or family-directed marriages are not the norm.

Some traits are generally predictive of a high chance of success for a long-term relationship independent of how long the premarital relationship lasted. However, traits that are helpful to the success of all long-term relationships are especially helpful — and potentially even necessary — for marriages that arise from a short premarital relationship. Marriages based on short premarital relationships are, in a sense, handicapped by that particular circumstance, making it essential that the couple have as many other positive factors as possible working in their favor. A short premarital period can, to some extent, be compensated for by factors such as high self-esteem in both partners, since self-esteem is largely independent of the length of the premarital relationship. Good communication skills can also compensate for a short courtship, though they are only partly independent of relationship length, since effective communication arises both from individual attributes and from the cumulative experience of building healthy communicative habits with another person over time.

References

Flowers, B. (2007). The limits of a technical concept of a good marriage: Exploring the role of virtue in communication skills. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 27(3), 327–340.

Larson, J. H. (2000). Should we stay together? A scientifically proven method for evaluating your relationship and improving its chances for long-term success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Marazziti, D., & Canale, D. (2004). Hormonal changes when falling in love. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 29, 931–936.

Niehuis, S. (2006). Organization of partner knowledge, its effect on passion, and the mediating effect of idealization. North American Journal of Psychology, 8, 33–46.

Niehuis, S., Skogrand, L., & Huston, T. (2006, June). When marriages die: Premarital and early marriage precursors to divorce. The Forum, 11(1). Retrieved from

Showers, C. J., & Zeigler-Hill, V. (2004). Organization of partner knowledge: Relationship outcomes and longitudinal change. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1198–1210.