Looking at Marriage

In the middle of a reading bender. I just got back from Brazil, and with the jet lag, I've had many late nights poring over old books and reading new ones. The latest was Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert's "sequel" to Eat, Pray, Love. It's a little haphazard -- skipping from point to point without a very strong narrative -- but it's basically an exploration of the institution of marriage: its origins, its evolution, its pitfalls.

I thought one of more interesting points was her synopsis of a Rutgers University report entitled "Alone Together: How Marriage is Changing in America." Part of the report examines "divorce proneness": how likely a couple is to fail based on certain demographic factors. Unsurprisingly, Gilbert notes that, as per the report: "[t]he age of a couple at the time of their marriage seems to be the most significant consideration. The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later."

In addition, she points out seven additional factors based on her understanding of the report (*this is directly quoted from her):

1. Education. The better-educated you are, statistically speaking, the better off your marriage will be. The better-educated a woman is, in particular, the happier her marriage will be.

2. Children. The statistics show that couples with young children at home report "more disenchantment" within their marriage than couples with grown children, or couples who have no children at all.

3. Cohabitation: It appears that people who live together before marriage have a slightly higher divorce rate than those who wait until marriage to cohabit.

4. Heterogamy: The less similar you and your partner are in terms of race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely you are to someday divorce. Opposites do attract, but they don't always endure. Sociologists suspect that this trend will diminsh as society's prejudices break down over time, but for now?

5. Social Integration: The more tightly wove a couple is within a community of friends and family, the stronger their marriage will be.

6. Religiousness: The more religious a couple is, the more likely they are to stay married, although faith offers only a slight edge.

7. Gender Fairness: Marriages based on a traditional, restrictive sense about a woman's place in the home tend to be less strong and less happy than marriages where the man and the woman regard each other as equals, and where the husband participates in more traditionally female and thankless household chores.

A few thoughts on this:

• I don't think a lot of it is surprising. For instance, getting married later in life means that you're more in tune with yourself, your needs, your desires. On the other hand, as some of my family members have pointed out: the younger you are, the more adaptable you are, able to grow together.
• Once again, people: correlation does not signify causation. I don't think these factors are set in stone, and who knows the predictive success? (I tried finding the study online and failed, so I also can't examine it more thoroughly. For example, what was the non-response rate?) Also, I'm a little skeptical of the author's ability to parse through the report, but that just comes from my belief that statistics can often be easily manipulated. (Numbers might not lie, but how one interprets the numbers can often be a game.)
• What about the other intangibles, like life goals? If two partners are thoroughly incompatible in terms of what they're seeking in life, what is the predictive success of the marriage?
• I'm a little unclear what this measured: Happiness? Tendency to divorce? What of the couples unhappily married?

So who knows, but there you have it. An interpretation of marital success based on Elizabeth Gilbert's understanding of a Rutgers report.