Why Married Couples Stay Together
The people around us play a critical role in decisions to stay or leave
The state of marriage seems pretty good these days. The divorce rate is falling, and polls consistently find that married Americans are overwhelmingly satisfied with their relationships. A poll we conducted earlier this year found that roughly eight in ten said they were completely or very satisfied with their marriages. Only five percent report being dissatisfied.
Despite this, divorce is not uncommon—Pew finds that one in three Americans who have ever been married end up divorced. The rate has risen among older Americans, but divorce is still an experience that more often occurs during the early years of marriage.
Plenty of couples still contemplate ending their marriages. In a recent survey, we asked married adults whether they had ever contemplated ending their marriage––more than one in five (21 percent) said they had. Women were only slightly more likely than men to report having considered a divorce. It is secular women who are most likely to have given thought to moving on. Nearly one in three (32 percent) nonreligious married women say they have contemplated ending their marriage, compared to roughly one in five religious married women. Secular married men are also less likely to have contemplated ending their marriages, with only 20 percent reporting that they thought about divorcing their spouse at any point.
Marriages end in divorce for all manner of reasons, and many couples who contemplate splitting up never go through with it. We have some pretty good ideas about why people get divorced, but what about the things that keep couples together?
The Social Roots of a Successful Marriage
Our social environment—the people we hang around—profoundly influences our behavior. People who hang out with smokers are far more likely to take up smoking themselves. Research has shown that if a friend gets divorced, your odds of also getting divorced increase dramatically. In one study, the authors looked at several decades of marriage and divorce records among Massachusetts residents, finding that your odds of getting divorced increase by 75 percent when a friend gets divorced. Even more distant relationships can influence marital success. When a friend of a friend got divorced, there was a significant uptick in divorce likelihood. That’s a remarkable finding.
Our research is consistent with this type of social clustering. If you are divorced, you are far more likely to have a close friend who is also divorced. Forty-one percent of divorced Americans report that they have at least some close friends who are divorced as well. In contrast, only 21 percent of married Americans have at least some close friends who are divorced. Most married Americans do not have any divorced friends.
Our surveys also show that marital satisfaction is measurably lower among those with divorced friends––a possible indication of future marital troubles. Close to half (46 percent) of married Americans with no close friends who are divorced report being “completely satisfied” in their relationship, compared to 34 percent who have at least some close friends who are divorced. The pattern is evident among men and women. We can’t say for sure that these social connections undermine feelings of relationship satisfaction, but the association is robust.
In follow-up conversations with a few respondents who were contemplating divorce, we heard similar stories about the importance of social support when it comes to marriage. “Mark,” a 41-year-old married man, said a close friend offered helpful advice after his marriage hit a rough patch when his wife started working again after nearly a decade of raising their children. Mark explained: “I talked to an old guy that I respected a bit later about the whole situation, and he had given me some pretty good perspective on making marriage first and foremost.... He had told me that if I were to make my marriage the first and foremost priority, that the kids will do good, you know, because of that.” Years later, when a childhood friend was facing marital problems, Mark felt compelled to offer support. “I usually just kind of sit and listen, but I was able to offer some perspective on it, where I was like, man, I know exactly what you’re talking about. And here’s how I dealt with it. I don’t think she hates you... She’s just doing her thing now, and she seems to be happy at it.”
Another woman, “Rebecca,” was struggling with a serious challenge to her marriage but felt optimistic about weathering it. “I have a really good support system, and I think that whether it’s my brother, or my friend or my mom, would all support us working on it. There’s never been a discussion of ‘how would we help you get through a divorce?’ It’s more like, ‘you guys got this.’” With the encouragement of her family, she and her husband are currently in relationship counseling.
In another interview, “Sarah” shared her experience of getting unhelpful marital advice from her divorced friends. “I just feel a little less close to my friends because they have had a divorce. Because they don’t know exactly what I’m going through, or when they try to help, they’ll just tell me to divorce the man.” Our social networks can help us maintain our relationships or undermine them. The kind of support and guidance we receive from friends and family can help us to weather the rough patches in our marriages or encourage us to end them.
A dedicated support system may matter even more in an age where social media is awash with unhelpful and pessimistic relationship content. When couples encounter inevitable relationship difficulties, social media can provide a tempting illusion of an alternative life. In a New York Times interview, Michel Janse, a 28-year-old divorcee who is vocal online about her failed marriage, said that social media made her constantly aware of the life she was missing. “I feel like with social media at our fingertips, we are just so much more aware of all the lives we could be living,” she said. “We’re scrolling through our feed and we see this girl lives on a sailboat in Maine, and then this girl lives in a high-rise in New York. You can just see firsthand what all these different lives look like, and that makes it easier to visualize a change or shift.”
Online forums are no substitute for a dedicated group of friends and family members, either. These platforms, such as the Subreddit “r/relationship_advice,” are an incredibly popular method of crowdsourcing relationship problems––but the value of this feedback is questionable. It might feel good to have your experiences validated by a collection of opinionated strangers, but Reddit users are not emotionally invested in the success of the relationship. And perhaps because of that, the advice seems skewed toward encouraging people to walk away. A recent analysis of Reddit relationship advice since 2010 found that an increasing proportion of the advice for people posing relationship questions was to end it, seek a divorce, or cut off contact. Half of all advice received by Redditors posting about their relationship struggles was categorized this way.
This is not to argue that this type of relationship advice is unhelpful or wrong. Or that people should not be free to leave a troubled or unsafe marriage. Of course they should. But we should not ignore the role that we all play in the marriages of the people close to us.
For many Americans, their marriages will succeed or not based on the individual effort they put into them. Yet, imagine if more people had a vested interest in the marriages of their close friends and family members. When marital troubles arise, our friends or family members could encourage us to seek counseling, advise patience, and recommend that we pay more attention to our partner’s needs rather than simply serving as one-sided validators of our relationship complaints.
These efforts are not entirely selfless. The authors of the same divorce study concluded that because divorce spreads through social networks, the success or failure of marriages has broader social implications. The authors write: “marriages endure within the context of communities of healthy relationships and within the context of social networks that encourage and support such unions.”
Not every marriage deserves to endure, and some relationships will carry on that probably should not, but marriage thrives more when it is not treated as an isolated commitment between two people. The success or failure of a marriage is due to more than the decisions two people make.