More than 90 percent of all Americans marry at least once, according to recent statistics, but new projections suggest that two-thirds of today’s new marriages will end in divorce.
How does the other third live? What are their secrets? Success stories have been largely left to the realm of women’s magazines, rather than serious science. Scholars and psychologists, for instance, have difficulty even agreeing on a definition of love.
But the need for better insights into the relationship for which most people strive seems crucial. Perhaps that’s why a study attempting to explain the elements of marital satisfaction among 104 couples was featured at the recent annual meeting in Chicago of the American Psychological Association, which includes 151,000 researchers, clinicians, educators and students.
The study was conducted by Scott Silberman and Sharon E. Robinson Kurpius at Arizona State University. Silberman currently teaches at Chandler-Gilbert Community College in the Phoenix area.
Q: It seems every time we open the paper or turn on the TV, there are reports on new studies about love. How does your work differ?
A: Many studies have examined love in relationships, but ours concentrated on marriage. We focused on marital satisfaction and its impact on the duration of a relationship. In the last 30 years, people’s expectations for entering marriage have changed considerably–from legal, social and economic obligations to comfort, affection and, most importantly, love. In fact, falling out of love is the second most common reason cited for divorce. Only adultery breaks up more marriages.
Q: How did you measure love and marital satisfaction?
A: Our model was a personality test developed in the late ’80s by Robert Sternberg, a well-known psychologist. It measures factors such as passion–the excitement in your sex life and in everything else you do with a partner; commitment–the willingness to stay with somebody; and intimacy, or friendship.
Q: They all seem basic, don’t they?
A: Sure. Sternberg believes that in a loving relationship, each component has to be equally present, and if partners report different levels, overall marital satisfaction will be lower.
Q: Yet in a good marriage, the factors still must be basically equal? So opposites may attract, but they better bring the same things to a relationship if it’s going to endure?
A: In theory, yes. But we found something different: It didn’t appear that both partners had to match equally in levels of commitment, passion or intimacy in order for the marriage to be content.
In fact, intimacy alone accounted for 60 percent of marital satisfaction–everybody wants to be married to a good friend.
Q: In other words, one partner may be passionate while the other is less so, and yet they both will report a happy marriage?
A: Yes. We sort of thought passion would be more important for men, that they would think, “bad sex life, bad marriage,” but that didn’t turn out to be true.
Q: Why? Do men merely cling to the other factors and make them compensate?
A: I don’t know. Maybe we’ve uncovered something that could help in marriage counseling. Men and women may not be all that different in how they view the importance of passion.
Q: What types of relationships can result from combinations of the three basic components?
A: In this model, “romantic love” is considered to be the combination of intimacy and passion. Because commitment is not a factor (at least at first), there’s no plan to continue the relationship long-term. “Fatuous love,” on the other hand, is a combination of passion and commitment in the absence of intimacy–people meet, fall in love and get married. These marriages usually don’t last because the passion declines and commitment is shallow because there was no time for intimacy to develop.
“Companionate love” involves intimacy and commitment and is seen in close friendships where passion has faded. Sternberg believes most romantic relationships that do survive turn into companionate love eventually.
Finally, “consummate love” results when all three components are present. This is the kind of love for which most people strive. Achieving it, though, can be quite complex and maintaining it even more difficult.
Q: What other results surprised you?
A: The real surprise was the overall lack of gender differences–like the John Gray stuff, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.” We didn’t find much of that.
Q: You found that a happily married woman’s level of passion tended to wane over time. Why?
A: Men may try harder at the beginning of the relationship to make things more fun, exciting and romantic, and over time that may die down. As a result, women tend to feel less passion and desire for their spouse. Of course, women may merely be more honest in their reporting.
Q: Yes. The husbands didn’t report waning passion, and you suspect they may be hiding their true feelings. Correct?
A: Other studies have found husbands associate satisfaction with the level of support and commitment they receive in their relationship, while women were more concerned about the degree of openness and flexibility in their communication with their spouse.
But there’s another factor here that may be important: Men tend to answer surveys in what they presume is a more socially desirable manner, so they may report more passion than they actually feel.
Q: What about commitment?
A: Men reported a rising level of commitment over time. Of course, the couples in our study were still married. Men who don’t feel it obviously may be gone. In 1990, it was reported that husbands historically have filed for divorce three times as often as wives. That is changing now.
Q: Is it possible that men who stay married longer tend to become more committed?
A: Certainly. Intimacy grows with time–so much so that people take it for granted. If you’ve been married 20 years, you don’t think to yourself: “Wow. I didn’t know she liked tennis.” You pretty much know all these things after a while. But the closeness is there; it still exists.
Q: What about affairs?
A: We included a lot of questions about trust, but not specifically about infidelity. But it’s becoming a hot topic, and it could be interesting to determine how it affects intimacy and commitment–can people become more committed after an affair? There’s a lot left to be done in this area. It’s a wide-open field.
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An edited transcript
