The Top Ten Myths of Marriage

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1. Marriage benefits men much more than women.

Contrary to earlier and widely publicized reports, recent
research finds men and women to benefit about equally from
marriage, although in different ways. Both men and women live
longer, happier, healthier and wealthier lives when they are
married. Husbands typically gain greater health benefits while
wives gain greater financial advantages.


2. Having children typically brings a married couple closer
together and increases marital happiness.

Many studies have shown that the arrival of the first baby
commonly has the effect of pushing the mother and father farther
apart, and bringing stress to the marriage. However, couples
with children have a slightly lower rate of divorce than
childless couples.


3. The keys to long-term marital success are good luck and
romantic love.

Rather than luck and love, the most common reasons couples give
for their long-term marital success are commitment and
companionship. They define their marriage as a creation that has
taken hard work, dedication and commitment (to each other and to
the institution of marriage). The happiest couples are friends
who share lives and are compatible in interests and values.


4. The more educated a woman becomes, the lower are her chances
of getting married.

A recent study based on marriage rates in the mid-1990s
concluded that today's women college graduates are more likely
to marry than their non-college peers, despite their older age
at first marriage. This is a change from the past, when women
with more education were less likely to marry.


5. Couples who live together before marriage, and are thus able
to test how well suited they are for each other, have more
satisfying and longer-lasting marriages than couples who do not.

Many studies have found that those who live together before
marriage have less satisfying marriages and a considerably
higher chance of eventually breaking up. One reason is that
people who cohabit may be more skittish of commitment and more
likely to call it quits when problems arise. But in addition,
the very act of living together may lead to attitudes that make
happy marriages more difficult. The findings of one recent
study, for example, suggest "there may be less motivation for
cohabiting partners to develop their conflict resolution and
support skills." (One important exception: cohabiting couples
who are already planning to marry each other in the near future
have just as good a chance at staying together as couples who
don't live together before marriage).


6. People can't be expected to stay in a marriage for a lifetime
as they did in the past because we live so much longer today.

Unless our comparison goes back a hundred years, there is no
basis for this belief. The enormous increase in longevity is due
mainly to a steep reduction in infant mortality. And while
adults today can expect to live a little longer than their
grandparents, they also marry at a later age. The life span of a
typical, divorce-free marriage, therefore, has not changed much
in the past fifty years. Also, many couples call it quits long
before they get to a significant anniversary: half of all
divorces take place by the seventh year of a marriage.


7. Marrying puts a woman at greater risk of domestic violence
than if she remains single.

Contrary to the proposition that for men "a marriage license is
a hitting license," a large body of research shows that being
unmarried-and especially living with a man outside of marriage-
is associated with a considerably higher risk of domestic
violence for women. One reason for this finding is that married
women may significantly underreport domestic violence. Further,
women are less likely to marry and more likely to divorce a man
who is violent. Yet it is probably also the case that married
men are less likely to commit domestic violence because they are
more invested in their wives' wellbeing, and more integrated
into the extended family and community. These social forces seem
to help check men's violent behavior.


8. Married people have less satisfying sex lives, and less sex,
than single people.

According to a large-scale national study, married people have
both more and better sex than do their unmarried counterparts.
Not only do they have sex more often but they enjoy it more,
both physically and emotionally.


9. Cohabitation is just like marriage, but without "the piece of
paper."

Cohabitation typically does not bring the benefits-in physical
health, wealth, and emotional wellbeing-that marriage does. In
terms of these benefits cohabitants in the United States more
closely resemble singles than married couples. This is due, in
part, to the fact that cohabitants tend not to be as committed
as married couples, and they are more oriented toward their own
personal autonomy and less to the wellbeing of their partner.


10. Because of the high divorce rate, which weeds out the
unhappy marriages, people who stay married have happier
marriages than people did in the past when everyone stuck it
out, no matter how bad the marriage.

According to what people have reported in several large national
surveys, the general level of happiness in marriages has not
increased and probably has declined slightly. Some studies have
found in recent marriages, compared to those of twenty or thirty
years ago, significantly more work-related stress, more marital
conflict and less marital interaction.10


~From the National(US)Marriage Project's Ten Things to Know Series~
http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/tenthingsseries.html