A PLEA FOR GREATER CONCERN ABOUT THE QUALITY OF MARITAL
MATCHING
Norval D. Glenn
University of Texas at Austin
Efforts to promote stable and high quality marriages fall into
two broad categories, consisting of those aimed at (a) getting the
right persons mated in the first place and (b) maintaining and
improving existing marriages. Until the past two or three
decades, persons and groups interested in promoting marital success
extensively employed both kinds of efforts. Emphasis on
promoting good marital choices was evident in marriage preparation
courses and in social scientific research on marital choice, while
efforts to improve existing marriages were to a large extent
through conventional marriage counseling.
In contrast to this earlier attention to both kinds of
methods to promote good marriages, in the pro-marriage movements
that emerged in the 1990s, emphasis on the importance of good
initial matching seems rather weak. The primary concern is
with teaching married couples good relationship skills and how to
deal with conflict constructively. Even the proponents of
marriage preparation education in the secondary schools seem more
interested in imparting relationship skills than in teaching
students how to choose spouses wisely. Some of the more
enthusiastic advocates of relationship skills education apparently
believe that almost any couple with enough mutual attraction to
consider marriage can achieve marital success with sufficient
motivation, effort, and access to the right kind of training.
Why pro-marriage activists' show less than intense concern about
promoting good marital choices is not readily apparent.
Possible reasons include that (a) many people have become convinced
by new evidence that problems in marriages are more likely to
result from poor relationship skills than from poor initial
matching, and (b) the activists lack confidence that anything very
effective can be done to improve marital choices. Or, many of
them may be concerned that increased public discussion of the
importance of good marital matching would tend to undermine marital
stability by exacerbating the already widespread tendency for
married persons to reconsider their marital choices.
Whatever the reasons for the lack of emphasis on marital choice
may be, this neglect is hard to justify. Although stressing
the ill effects of poor marital matching might have some unintended
negative consequences on existing marriages, and although the
importance of good initial matching relative to other influences on
marital success is debatable, to my knowledge no authority on
marriage has ever claimed that good matching is not
important. Even if virtually any heterosexual pair with good
skills and mutual attraction can have a reasonably good marriage,
an equally skilled but optimally matched couple can almost
certainly have a better one with less effort.
It is time, therefore, for pro-marriage activists to give
more attention to promoting good marital choices, not by
de-emphasizing other efforts to improve and sustain marriages but
by a modest reallocation of energy, time, and resources. The
purpose of this essay is to instigate such a change.
The Nature and Importance of Optimal Matching
In view of the fact that virtually everyone agrees that
good marital matching is important, giving reasons for its
importance may seem superfluous. However, understanding of
the how and why of the importance is often not very sophisticated,
being based on little more than the notion that spouses should have
similar interests and values. Even academic discussions of
the suitability of spouses to one another often seem to be based on
the assumption that good matches could be made with such
information as that yielded by personality tests, interest
inventories, and assessments of values. Of course, such
information can to some degree predict which persons will marry,
and among those who do, which ones will have successful
marriages. However, the predictive power of such information
is not very high, and by itself it can provide only limited insight
into what constitutes a good marital match. I have devised a
simple theory and conceptual scheme, an abbreviated version of
which I present here, that goes beyond simple compatibility and
homogamy to specify more completely the nature of optimal
matching.
The most popular theories of marital choice devised by social
scientists all use the concept of marriage market and draw a rough
analogy between the search for a suitable spouse and the search for
goods and services in the economic marketplace.1 According to
these theories, just as consumers try to get as much in the way of
desirable goods and services as they can, given the amount of money
they have to spend, persons searching for spouses try to get mates
who are as desirable as possible, given what the searching persons
have to offer on the marriage market.
At least in any one subculture in one society at one point in
time, there is considerable agreement about what makes a person a
desirable husband or wife, and thus it is useful to conceive of
general marital desirability, or a person's average desirability to
persons of the opposite sex who are on the marriage market.2
However, the agreement on standards of desirability is far from
perfect, so it is also useful to conceive of person-specific
marital desirability, or a person's desirability to a specific
other person of the opposite sex. What a person on the
marriage market tries to maximize, of course, is the
person-specific desirability (to himself or herself) of the person
he or she marries.
I need not deal here with the characteristics that are the
basis of marital desirability, except to point out that they go
beyond the obvious ones such as physical appearance, earning
ability, character, and personality. They of course include
relationship skills and other traits that are subject to deliberate
change; thus efforts to improve existing marriages are attempts to
increase the person-specific desirability of the spouses to one
another. Some of the characteristics that make a person
desirable to a specific person of the opposite sex are intangibles
not well understood by the attractee or by anyone else.
Although marital desirability is not amenable to precise
measurement, for theoretical purposes it is useful to assume that
it can be measured on an eleven-point scale, varying from ten for
the highest desirability to zero for the lowest. If there
were no variation in standards of desirability, if there were equal
numbers of men and women on the market, if the distribution of
desirability were the same for males and females, and if everyone
had complete knowledge of everyone else's characteristics, the tens
would all end up married to tens, the nines to nines, and so forth,
with the zeroes being left to one another. Fortunately, the
lack of perfect agreement on standards prevents such a harsh system
of mating. Even many of the persons with very low general
marital desirability have fairly high person-specific desirability
to a few persons of the opposite sex. With ideal functioning
of the market, most people should be able to acquire spouses whose
person-specific desirability to them is at least moderately higher
than their own general marital desirability. Among persons of
rather low general desirability, those whose standards are most
nearly unique are the ones most likely to be able to marry persons
highly desirable to them.
The most stable and successful marriages are likely to be those
in which the spouses are substantially more desirable to one
another than they are to most other people. An example would
be spouses who are both threes in general desirability but eights
to one another. These persons are likely to appreciate one
another, and neither will have abundant desirable alternatives to
lure them out of, or to lessen their commitment to, their present
marriage. Conversely, those marriages in which the spouses
are more desirable to many others than to one another are unlikely
to succeed. A marriage with intermediate prospects for
success, and one rather likely to occur, is one in which the
spouses are about as desirable to one another as they are to most
other people.
A second and related requirement for a good marital match is
that each spouse should get about as much in the way of
person-specific desirability in a spouse as is possible given what
he or she has to offer on the market. Those who marry before
adequately testing their marital desirability may settle for
someone less desirable than they are able to attract. When
such persons realize that they have "undersold" themselves on the
marriage market, as will almost inevitably happen eventually,
dissatisfaction and withdrawal of commitment are likely, especially
under current conditions.
Another useful conceptual distinction is between real marital
desirability and apparent marital desirability. The former is
how desirable a mate the person will really be, while the latter is
how desirable it appears the person will be on the basis of
incomplete knowledge of his or her characteristics. Initial
screening on the marriage market occurs on the basis of apparent
desirability, of course, but so does the final decision to marry,
because real marital desirability can be assessed precisely only
after marriage. The higher the ratio of real to apparent
desirability of each spouse when the decision to marry is made, the
greater is the probability of marital success.
Conditions Conducive to Optimal Matching
A primary requirement for good initial marital matching is
the opportunity for those "on the market" to get to know a large
number and variety of prospective spouses, and to get to know them
well enough to assess their desirability on the basis of more than
just their most obvious and readily observable
characteristics. Without extensive knowledge of persons of
the opposite sex who are on the market, a person is unlikely ever
to find and connect with one of the most suitable prospects.
Furthermore, without sufficient "circulation" in the market, the
person will not adequately test his or her own desirability.
A common obstacle to sufficient circulation in the marriage
market and to linking up with one of the most suitable prospects is
premature entanglement. This occurs when a relationship with one
prospect reaches a point at which ending the relationship is very
difficult and when the person lacks knowledge of how desirable that
prospect is relative to other prospects he or she could
attract.
Entanglement must eventually occur of course if the person is to
move toward marriage, and from that time on, the selection process
is no longer a matter of mentally lining up prospects, comparing
them, and selecting one from the lineup. Rather, one can then
only decide to continue the relationship or withdraw from it, and
if the opportunity to marry develops, to take advantage of that
opportunity or not do so. At that point, the main comparison
made is with opportunities the person thinks he or she will or
would have in the future. Unless the person chosen perfectly
fits the chooser's image of an ideal spouse, or unless the chooser
has an illusion of such a fit, the decision to marry reflects a
pessimistic assessment of future opportunities. The more
realistic this assessment is, the better the marital match will
be. Ideally, the person making the decision will have gained
enough knowledge of self and others through experience on the
marriage market, and through pre-market heterosexual experiences,
to make a realistic assessment.
Persons on the marriage market are of course highly motivated to
make the market function well, but this motivation does not always
lead the seekers of spouses to act wisely and rationally to achieve
their ends. For instance, although the good match is one that
maximizes the desirability of spouses to one another in the long
run and not just at the time of marriage, persons searching for
mates may focus unduly on short-term considerations and thus on
ephemeral rather than enduring characteristics of prospective
mates. Furthermore, some enduring characteristics may elicit
feelings of infatuation or intense feelings of romantic love but
fail to contribute much to long-term desirability.
Given the fallibility of the judgement of persons searching for
mates, the best choices are likely to be made by persons
substantially influenced by friends and family members, who often
can be more objective and rational about the choice than the
persons themselves. Of course, the influence of these other
persons is likely to improve the selection process only if the
others have good judgement and sufficient knowledge of the
prospects being considered.
Some Current Obstacles to Good Marital Matching
Just how well marriage markets in the United States now function
is unknown. Although it should be possible to study the
processes of marital choice in such a way as to assess the adequacy
of the marital matching that results from them, such research has
not been done. There are reasons to think, however, that the
markets are not functioning very well and that poor marital matches
are common. There is little reason to believe that optimal
matching has been the usual outcome of the mating process anytime
in recent decades, and some recent changes may have lowered the
probability of that outcome.
Arguably the most consequential of the several recent changes
that have affected how marital matching typically occurs is the
increase in the average age of the persons involved. In just
one decade, from 1980 to 1990, the percentage of men who married
who were under age 20 declined from 8.5 to 4.3 and the comparable
percentage for women went from 21.1 to 10.6.3 The percentage
of persons who married who were under age 25 dropped from 44.2 to
29.0 for men and from 58.2 to 39.9 for women. In 1990, 27.4
percent of the men and 21.0 of the women who married were age 35 or
older, compared with 19.7 percent and 13.8 percent, for men and
women respectively, a decade earlier. These changes, which
started in the 1970s and have continued since 1990, to a large
extent reflect an increase in the percentage of brides and grooms
entering second and subsequent marriages. In 1970, neither
spouse in 68.6 percent of the marriages had been previously
married, but by 1988, that percentage had declined to 54.1.
(More recent data are not available, but the percentage was
virtually stable during the eighties and has probably changed
little since then.) The increase in the average age of
marrying persons also reflects an increase in the median age of
persons entering first marriages, which went from 22.5 for men and
20.6 for women in 1970 to 26.8 and 25.0, for men and women
respectively, in 1997.4
On balance, these changes may have tended to increase the
quality of marital matching; the marriages of very young persons
are notoriously unsuccessful, on the average, and there are several
reasons for thinking that poor matching contributes substantially
to these poor outcomes.
Consider, for instance, that among persons on the threshold of
adulthood, both the characteristics that form the basis for their
own marital desirability and their standards for evaluating the
desirability of others tend to be very changeable. To
illustrate, to the 17-year-old woman just completing high school,
the popular high school athlete may seem highly desirable, even if
he lacks the characteristics valued in the adult world that would
make him a desirable husband. Persons' own desirability and
their standards of desirability never become absolutely fixed but
tend to stabilize in the first few years of adulthood.
Obviously, marriages formed while these characteristics are still
changing rapidly are not likely to be very good matches in terms of
the maximization of the long-term desirability of the spouses to
one another. Even if these characteristics are reasonably
stable, persons who marry early are unlikely adequately to test
their desirability on the marriage market.
While the decline in very early marriages has almost certainly
been beneficial, the increase in persons on the marriage market who
are older than their middle twenties probably has not contributed
to better marital matching. The data on age at marriage and
divorce suggest that prospects for marital stability are enhanced
little or not at all by postponing marriage beyond the middle to
late twenties.5 There is evidence that prospects for
achieving highly successful marriages may be diminished by
postponing first marriage beyond ages 22-23 in the case of women
and 24-25 in the case of men6--possibly in part because conditions
are typically less conducive to optimal matching at the older
ages.
Conditions conducive to effective "circulation," as that term is
defined above, are probably better in secondary schools and
colleges and universities than in any other setting in which most
persons are likely to find themselves. In the recent past, a
substantial proportion of the persons who ended their education
with high school graduation married persons they met in school, and
many who went to college met their spouses there. I know of
no evidence on the topic, but the increase in the average age at
first marriage has very likely been accompanied by a decline in
marriages of persons who met in school or college. Once one
goes into the adult world of work, opportunities to meet
interesting and desirable persons of the opposite sex are likely to
decline substantially. Social contacts on the job are often
superficial and impersonal and with persons who are not of the
right age and/or marital status to be prospective spouses.
There are major obstacles, including anti-fraternization rules, to
romantic involvement with work associates, especially those above
or below oneself in the organizational hierarchies. For many
employed persons on the marriage market, the search for a spouse is
restricted to leisure time, and that time is often quite limited
for ambitious young adults starting their careers. Therefore,
the movement away from school or college into full-time employment
almost certainly exerts some negative influence on the
effectiveness of mate selection processes.
Another reason why postponement of marriage may lead to poorer
marital matching is that the early stages of adulthood are
characterized by movement--both geographic and social--away from
parents, other kin, and long-time friends, and thus the longer
marriage is postponed, the less likely it is that those persons
most likely to exert positive influences on marital choice will do
that. Movement away from one's geographic and social origins
before a mate is selected lessens the probability that the one
married will be a long-term acquaintance and must to some extent
increase the risk of marrying someone whose apparent marital
desirability is substantially higher than his or her real
desirability.
An important recent trend associated with the increase in the
average age of those who marry is the increase in the proportion of
people who cohabit while they are on the marriage market.
Among some of the more liberal and secular portions of the American
population, cohabitation has become a normal and expected stage of
the mate selection process. Many students of marriage have
encouraged this change, because they believe, in the language I
introduce above, that it should lessen the ratio of apparent to
real marital desirability at the time of marriage. According
to this point of view, it is desirable for couples to test their
compatibility, to see how they get along while living together,
before they decide to marry.
However, research on cohabitation during the past decade has
rather conclusively refuted the view that premarital cohabitation
is an effective means to prevent inappropriate marital
matches.7 It probably does prevent some marriages that should
not occur, but the divorce rate for couples who have cohabited
before marriage is substantially higher than that for couples who
have not cohabited. This difference, almost all scholars who
have addressed the topic agree, is partially spurious; persons with
values and attitudes not conducive to marital success are more
likely to cohabit before marriage than others. More
controversial is the view of several scholars that habits and
patterns of relating developed during cohabitation have detrimental
effects on marriage.
An additional reason for the negative relationship between
premarital cohabitation and marital stability may be that although
cohabitation prevents some inappropriate marital matches, it leads
to others. As I point out above, in a well-functioning
marriage market, persons seeking spouses gain as much knowledge of
prospective spouses as possible while avoiding premature
entanglement. That entanglement inhibits obtaining knowledge
about alternative prospects and initiates pressures toward marriage
that are hard to resist, even if one discovers that the prospect is
not as desirable as one had thought. In the case of young
adults living together, these pressures often come from parents and
other kin--an instance of pernicious influence from persons whose
influence is likely to be typically beneficial. For lovers,
"breaking up is hard to do" under any circumstances and is likely
to be especially difficult when they are living together.
Sometimes it may be so difficult that it is easier to marry, and to
convince oneself that the match is not as bad as it really
is. Traditionally, the momentum toward marriage was so strong
that it was very difficult to stop only after the announcement of
an engagement, a milestone likely to be passed after much more
deliberation than that which usually precedes the decision to
cohabit.
The effects on the quality of marital matches of the increase in
previously married persons on the marriage market are not clear but
are unlikely to be on balance positive. These persons face
the selection process with more experience and maturity than they
had when they first married, but it is not clear that they are
necessarily better equipped on the average than other marriage
market participants to make wise judgements and choices. They
are likely to be unusually free of influences from kin and
long-term friends, and their experiences with marriage that may
contribute to wisdom may also leave them cynical and fearful of
commitment.
The situation of single parents on the marriage market is
crucially different from that of other participants, and different
in ways likely to diminish their chances of making good marital
matches. The most obvious handicap is that single parents
have relatively little time and energy to spend searching for
spouses. Perhaps equally important is that the parent and
his/her child or children are on the market as a package; anyone
considering marrying a single parent is contemplating taking on two
roles--spouse and step-parent--and is likely to evaluate the
characteristics of the prospective step-child or step-children as
well as those of the prospective spouse. This added
complexity makes good marital matching inherently harder to
achieve. Furthermore, the child or children of the single
parent may participate, if only subtly, in the selection
process. Whereas the influence of kin on marital choice
should usually be beneficial, the influence of those lacking mature
judgement may not be. Emotional attachment of children to a
parent's prospective spouse may lead to premature entanglement,
especially when there is cohabitation.
Whatever recent trends in the influences affecting the quality
of marital choices may have been, there are strong reasons for
believing that a large percentage of marital matches are falling
far short of being optimal and that many people are finding it
difficult to connect with appropriate mates. Although
evidence from social scientific research on the adequacy of the
functioning of marriage markets is lacking, informal evidence
suggests a rather dismal picture. Commercial dating services
have proliferated in recent years, the volume of personal
advertisements in newspapers has apparently increased, and many
people are resorting to the internet to connect with potential
mates, in spite of the lack of protection from deception and
exploitation that medium provides. This suggests widespread
unmet needs--perhaps even widespread desperation--for effective
pathways to good marital matches.
Can Anything Be Done to Promote Good Marital Matches?
It is relatively easy to identify probable barriers to
optimal marital matching in contemporary American society, but it
is hard to identify ways to remove or lower those obstacles.
Many of the adverse conditions seem intractable, and many of the
apparently negative trends seem inevitable and irreversible.
It is thus understandable that most attempts to improve mating
processes have been aimed at individuals and not at the conditions
under which they seek spouses.
The most widely advocated means of improving marital choices is
through education, including marriage preparation courses and
premarital counseling. Although there are limits to the
extent to which formal courses and counseling can impart wisdom and
good judgement, a great deal more could be done through these means
to promote good marital choices than is being done. For
instance, while the Catholic Church has a rather good record of
requiring and encouraging premarital education and counseling, the
Protestant denominations, as a whole, have done far less
well. Marriage preparation courses in the public schools are
rare and almost certainly generally of poor quality when they are
offered. Functional marriage and family courses at the
college level attract a small but not insignificant proportion of
college students, but if the textbooks available for adoption for
such courses indicate their substance, they give little guidance
for marital choice.8 The potential for formal education and
counseling to contribute to good marital matching is considerable
but apparently largely unfulfilled. Obviously, there are
opportunities for pro-marriage scholars and activists to try to
reach that potential. They could, for instance, prepare or
commission the preparation of educational materials on marital
choice that would be sounder and more effective than those now
available.9
The most important education about marriage and marital choice,
however, is almost certainly informal and through such influences
as those from parents, siblings, other kin, friends, and exposure
to the mass media. There is little that activists can do to
change the nature of many of these influences, but they can to some
extent improve the quality of those from the media. Some
exemplary work of this nature has been done, including especially
the report on cohabitation written by David Popenoe and Barbara
Whitehead and issued by the National Marriage Project.10 This
report received widespread attention in the media and helped dispel
the popular belief that the odds for marital success can be
substantially improved by using cohabitation as a test for
compatibility.
It is of course very important to help persons be wise and
rational participants in marriage markets, but a greater potential
for improving marital matching may lie in changing the way the
markets operate and the conditions under which persons seek
mates. Wisdom and good judgement cannot have their greatest
effects if, for instance, those who possess those qualities have
limited opportunities to meet and get to know prospective spouses
and if their social networks do not exert positive influences on
their activities and interactions that may lead to marriage.
To repeat a point I make above, if there is inadequate circulation
in marriage markets, the persons who could form the best matches
are unlikely ever to connect.
There has been no systematic research to assess how well the
institutional mechanisms for mate selection are working, and no one
has done an inventory of what religious and other organizations are
doing to facilitate the circulation that is necessary for good
marital matching. Sponsorship of such research is an obvious
first step that could be undertaken by pro-marriage activists, and
social scientists interested in marriage should plan and propose
such research. We do not need formal studies of mate
selection processes, however, to know that they are not working as
well as they should and could.
There are some good models of what could be done to facilitate
good marital matches. For instance, some religious
organizations, including a good many Jewish congregations, do an
exemplary job of providing opportunities for unmarried people to
get to know one another under favorable conditions. The
activities and arrangements for circulation provided by the Jewish
organizations probably have some continuity with the traditional
Jewish matchmakers, and they reflect to some extent a desire to
promote religious and ethnic endogamy. Without such
traditions and motivations, Christian congregations and
organizations would be expected to do less well, which, it seems to
me, is the case.
It is of course easier to exhort than to implement effective
programs; organizations interested in facilitating good marital
matches face formidable obstacles to achieving their goal.
The singles activities they promote are susceptible to the same
kind of stigma that has plagued singles clubs in recent decades,
namely, the image that they attract mainly losers. When
matchmaking is the only or the most explicit purpose of an
activity, a "meat market" atmosphere tends to emerge, and there is
a risk of attracting exploitative participants. The main
traditional advantage of seeking spouses at churches has been that
there is where persons of good character and high morals are likely
to be found. This advantage is diminished when there is
attraction to church activities only for the purpose of making
social contacts.
In view of such problems, it is clear that good intentions are
not sufficient; there needs to be a sharing of knowledge by persons
and organizations that have tried to implement programs to promote
optimal matching. A great deal of such sharing may occur
informally, but there appears to be little literature on the
topic. This is another area in which pro-marriage activists
and scholars could contribute.
The promotion of good marriage market circulation is in part
educational, because many participants lack full knowledge of the
activities in their communities that provide good opportunities to
meet potential spouses. Pro-marriage activists could compile
directories of the relevant organizations and distribute calendars
of their activities. Reporting information on the sex ratios
of the memberships of the organizations might help to rectify
imbalances in the numbers of men and women.
Business organizations and other employers could take steps to
facilitate good marital matches among their employees, though
whether it is in their interest to do so is arguable. Much
has been written about the need for family-friendly policies and
practices on the part of employers, and some such policies have
been implemented. However, these policies generally do
nothing to promote family formation among unmarried employees and
fail to benefit those who are both unmarried and childless.
Indeed, efforts to relieve married persons from unwanted evening
and weekend work often overburden single employees and interfere
with their social lives and thus their search for spouses.
Furthermore, discouragement of work place romances by employers may
go well beyond what is necessary to prevent sexual harassment and
promote fairness and efficiency. And when employers sponsor
social and recreational activities for their employees, they do not
always take the needs of single employees into account, for
instance by trying to give those who work in different departments
opportunities to get to know one another.
I could continue with suggestions for ways to promote good
marital matching, but my purpose here is to encourage discussion of
the topic rather than to provide a blueprint for action. My
ideas are embryonic, and I do not know what methods would be most
effective. I am confident, however, that if pro-marriage
scholars and activists were to turn their collective imagination to
the topic, the quality of matching, and thus prospects for marital
success, could be measurably improved.
Endnotes
1. The simple theory and
conceptual scheme presented here draw indirectly on the various
"exchange" theories of marital choice in the literature, the most
influential being in, or based on, the theories presented in Peter
M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life, New York: Wiley,
1964; George C. Homans, Social Behavior: Its Elementary
Forms, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961; and J. W.
Thibaut and H. H. Kelley, The Social Psychology of Groups, New
York: Wiley, 1959.
There of course are many rather than just
one marriage market in a country, most of which are based largely
on locality. The fact that their boundaries are indefinite
poses problems for research but need not concern me here.
2. Just who is and is not "on the
market" is not entirely clear. Some people go on the market
only after they encounter a particularly attractive prospect, and
even married persons may be tentatively on the market. See
Bernard Farber, "The Future of the American Family: A
Dialectical Account," Journal of Family Issues Volume 8,
1987, pp. 431-433.
3. U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical
Abstract of the United States: 1999, Page 111, Table
158.
4. U. S. Census Bureau, Current
Population Reports, Series P20-506, "Marital Status and
Living Arrangements: March 1998 (Update)."
5. Norval D. Glenn and Michael
Supancic, "The Social and Demographic Correlates of Divorce and
Separation in the United States: An Update and
Reconsideration," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Volume 46,
1984, pp. 564-575; and more recent unpublished analyses of data
from the General Social Surveys.
6. Analyses of data from the General
Social Surveys show that persons who married at these ages were
more likely to be in stable and successful first marriages than
persons who married at older ages. Of course, this
relationship could be spurious rather than causal, that is, the
same influences could lead to late marriage and lowered prospects
for marital success.
7. David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead, Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to
Know about Cohabitation Before Marriage: A Comprehensive
Review of Recent Research, New Brunswick, NJ: The National
Marriage Project.
8. For a critique of some of the
books, see Norval D. Glenn, "A Critique of Twenty Family and
Marriage and the Family Textbooks," Family Relations, Volume 46,
1997, pp. 197-208.
9. An abundance of trade books and
popular magazine articles give advice about how to find and connect
with good potential spouses, which is evidence that many people
feel a need for education on the topic. However, these
materials, while occasionally insightful, are of very uneven
quality, and with few exceptions are not based on sound research or
sophisticated theory.
10. Popenoe and Whitehead, op
cit.
Back to Articles page
To Smart Marriages Home Page