Is marriage becoming obsolete?

[deep]

Is marriage becoming obsolete?

By Stephanie Coontz, Special to CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
40 percent of adults in study say marriage becoming obsolete, yet most say they want to marry
Stephanie Coontz asks, why the disconnect?
She cites changed gender roles, raised expectations for financial stability in marriage
Coontz: Widening economic gap in U.S. is reflected in marriage gap

(CNN) -- According to a TIME/Pew research poll released last week, 40 percent of Americans believe that marriage is becoming obsolete, up from just 28 percent in 1978.

In that same poll, only one in four unmarried Americans say they do not want to get married. And among currently married men and women, 80 percent say their marriage is as close as or closer than their parents' marriage.

These seemingly contradictory responses reflect the public's recognition of a new and complex reality. On the one hand, marriage as a voluntary relationship based on love and commitment is held in higher regard than ever, with more people saying that love is essential to marriage (Consider that in 1967, two-thirds of college women said they'd consider marrying a man they didn't love if he met other criteria, such as offering respectability and financial security.)

But as an institution that regulates people's lives, marriage is no longer the social and economic necessity it once was. People can construct successful lives outside marriage in ways that would have been very difficult to manage 50 years ago, and they have a far greater range of choices about whether to marry, when to marry, and how to organize their marriages.

This often makes them more cautious in committing to marriage and more picky about their partners than people were in the past.

In the 1950s, when half of all American women were already married in their teens, marriage was an almost mandatory first step toward adulthood. It was considered the best way to make a man grow up, and in an economy where steady jobs and rising real wages were widely available, that often worked.

For a woman, marriage was deemed the best investment she could make in her future, and in a world where even college-educated women earned less than men with a only a high school education, that often worked for her too.

Marriage was also supposed to be the only context in which people could regularly have sex or raise children. Divorced or unmarried men were routinely judged less qualified for bank loans or job promotions, sexually active single women were stigmatized, and out-of-wedlock children had few legal rights.

Today, however, there are plenty of other ways to grow up, seek financial independence, and meet one's needs for companionship and sex. So what might have seemed a "good enough" reason to enter marriage in the past no longer seems sufficient to many people.

Marriage has become another step, perhaps even the final rather than the first step, in the transition to adulthood -- something many people will not even consider until they are very sure they are capable of taking their relationship to a higher plane.

Couples increasingly want to be certain, before they marry, that they can pay their bills, that neither party is burdened by debt, that each has a secure job or a set of skills attesting to their employability. Many are also conscious that as rigid gender roles erode, marriage demands more negotiation and relationship skills than in the past.

They often want firsthand experience with how their partner will behave in an intimate relationship, which is why the majority of new marriages come after a period of cohabitation, according to census figures.

These higher expectations are good news for many marriages. People who can meet the high bar that most Americans now feel is appropriate for the transition to marriage -- people who delay marriage to get an education, who have accumulated a nest egg or established themselves in a secure line of work -- typically have higher quality marriages than other Americans, research shows, and their divorce rates have been falling for the past 25 years.

But these higher expectations pose difficulties for individuals with fewer interpersonal and material resources. Over the past 30 years, job opportunities and real wages have declined substantially for poorly educated men, making them less attractive marriage partners for women. When such men do find stable employment, they often tend to be more interested in a woman with good earnings prospects than someone they have to rescue from poverty.

Today, several studies have shown, economic instability is now more closely associated with marital distress than it used to be.

If a low-income woman finds a stable, employed partner, she will likely be better off by marrying. But if the man she marries loses his job or is less committed and responsible than she had hoped, she may end up worse off than before -- having to support a man who can't or won't pull his own weight.

So the widening economic gap between haves and have-nots that America has experienced in recent decades is increasingly reflected in a widening marriage gap as well. Today two-thirds of people with a college degree are married, compared with less than half of those with a high school degree or less.

Those who begin married life with the most emotional and material advantages reap the greatest gains in those same areas from marriage. The very people who would benefit most from having a reliable long-term partner are the ones least likely to be able to find such a partner or sustain such a relationship.

This is a troubling trend that deserves attention from policy-makers. But the problem does not lie in a lack of family values. The poor value marriage just as highly as anyone else, and they may value children even more. Unfortunately, they are now less and less likely to believe they will be able to live up to the high expectations of modern partnerships, even if they are in love.

There is no easy fix for this problem. But the good news is that families still matter to Americans, including those who are not married.

According to the Pew poll, 76 percent of Americans say family is the most important, meaningful part of their life. Seventy-five percent say they are "very satisfied" with their family life. And 85 percent say that the family they live in today, whatever its form, is as close as or closer than the family in which they grew up. We have a lot of challenges ahead of us, but that's comforting news.


Editor's note: Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her latest book, "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s," will be published in January by Basic Books.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephanie Coontz.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/11/22/coontz.marriage.pew/index.html?hpt=C1

 

[Butterscotch]

Interesting that they say the well off are more likely to marry. From what I've seen, it's the poor who get married more out of necessity and old fashioned tradition. The more 'affluent' I know are less likely to marry and merge their money and stuff for possible split up later. Maybe they are only counting the ones who are currently not married, and some of the lower income people had been in the past but were now living together in fear of making another mistake.
Overall I do agree marriage is becoming obsolete. Ironic when nobody wants to get married the gays still do and people won't let them.

 

[yolland]

Obsolete probably isn't the right word...usually that implies replacement by some particular alternative that most find superior, and none seems to have emerged at this point, statistically speaking. It's more that it's no longer the taken-for-granted adult destiny it once was.

Personally, I'm a lot more concerned about the fact that 25% (and counting) of American children are being raised by single parents, and about the general decline in community ties (which IMO makes everyone more vulnerable, but especially children of poor, minority single parents), than I am about whether adults pursue their needs for intimacy in marital form, per se.

BTW, here's the full report (first page of 6): The Decline of Marriage And Rise of New Families | Pew Social & Demographic Trends

 

[A stor]

I can't speak for others. I married. Simply because, I wanted to. I am still with my husband of almost twenty eight years. Commitment and family are very important to me.

 

[Moonlit_Angel]

I think the title's sort of misleading. Judging from the way I read that article, it doesn't sound like marriage is becoming "obsolete", rather more that it's just going through another change in the way it's done, just like it has every other time throughout history.

Divorced or unmarried men were routinely judged less qualified for bank loans or job promotions

I honestly didn't know this. Wow. Rigid much? I mean, I guess I can understand in a way being cautious about working with divorced people, because of the money they rack up dealing with the divorce itself (which can put them in debt), but still...to assume you're automatically less qualified for such things simply because you're divorced or not married isn't fair. But then again, given the time period that was happening in, guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise.

On the one hand I like that people are starting to be more careful about what they're looking for when it comes to entering into a marriage. This isn't a decision to take lightly, and it's good that people are starting to focus more on making sure their personal stuff is all together before bringing someone else into the picture and possibly burdening them with their issues, or vice versa. And if you and your partner are both looking for the same things in terms of stability, that could bode well for your life together and for any future family you may have.

On the other hand, however, you can plan all you want, and sometimes things still fall apart, so it's hard to always say, "Well, I'm not getting married until x, y, and z happens." If your criteria is TOO strict, either your expectations are unrealistically high or you're using that as a means to hide your own fears/worries about marriage. That's my theory, anyway.

As for the issue of the poorer people not being able to live up to the expectations about marriage nowadays, well, the only expectations you should have to worry about are the ones you've set for yourself, or the expectations of your intended. Everyone's views on the subject are different. I do feel, though, that ultimately the best barometer to whether or not you should marry is how much you love each other and if you can imagine yourselves being together for the rest of your lives. I think that has to be in place first, because once that's established, a couple can be able to navigate all the tough issues-financial, educational, etc.-a lot better together.

Also, to Butterscotch's point about gay marriage.

Angela

 

[A stor]

Interesting that they say the well off are more likely to marry. From what I've seen, it's the poor who get married more out of necessity and old fashioned tradition. The more 'affluent' I know are less likely to marry and merge their money and stuff for possible split up later. Maybe they are only counting the ones who are currently not married, and some of the lower income people had been in the past but were now living together in fear of making another mistake.
Overall I do agree marriage is becoming obsolete. Ironic when nobody wants to get married the gays still do and people won't let them.

I agree, it is ironic. I have no problem with any couple who wants to get married. Gay or straight.

 

[nathan1977]

According to the Pew poll, 76 percent of Americans say family is the most important, meaningful part of their life. Seventy-five percent say they are "very satisfied" with their family life. And 85 percent say that the family they live in today, whatever its form, is as close as or closer than the family in which they grew up. We have a lot of challenges ahead of us, but that's comforting news.

This statistic seems to minimize whatever shock value the MSM is trying to exploit from the study.

If anything, I think the article is more telling about the growing gap between the classes -- and the cost of the stress of survival if you're poor -- than it does about the state of marriage.

 

[Axver]

In a personal sense, my partner and I certainly consider marriage obsolete and irrelevant (though I agree the title is a bit misleading). As atheists, we have no religious reason to marry. Neither of us have cultural traditions that make a marriage appealling. Australia offers de facto couples the same rights as married couples, so we don't even have any compelling legal or financial reason to marry. To us, it's just a meaningless piece of paper accompanied by a pointless and financially onerous ceremony. I emphasise to us; if other people find personal significance in marriage, cool, but it's an irrelevancy and an archaic social tradition as far as our own relationship goes.

It's funny - with just one exception, all the couples in my immediate family that have managed to stay together for more than two decades have never married.

I'd like to make a couple of direct comments on the article too:

Marriage has become another step, perhaps even the final rather than the first step, in the transition to adulthood -- something many people will not even consider until they are very sure they are capable of taking their relationship to a higher plane.

Couples increasingly want to be certain, before they marry, that they can pay their bills, that neither party is burdened by debt, that each has a secure job or a set of skills attesting to their employability.

I find the very idea insulting that marriage is, in any way or form, a step in the transition to adulthood or a means to take a relationship to a higher plane. I am less of an adult or have a lesser relationship because my partner and I see no significance in a piece of paper? Come on now.

And, uh, I think de facto couples want to be just as certain of their financial security as married couples.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Marriage has nothing to do with any sort of affirmation of "adulthood". That's a very archaic notion.

 

[nathan1977]

I find the very idea insulting that marriage is, in any way or form, a step in the transition to adulthood or a means to take a relationship to a higher plane. I am less of an adult or have a lesser relationship because my partner and I see no significance in a piece of paper? Come on now.

I'm not sure why it's insulting to say that there's a significant difference between two people who are casually (or even not-casually) dating, and two people who have made a legal commitment to each other.

And, uh, I think de facto couples want to be just as certain of their financial security as married couples.

Don't disagree, but married couples whose finances are commingled have a trickier challenge than those who don't, and I'm going to take a wild guess and say that married couples have a greater tendency to pool their money than those who aren't.

Marriage has nothing to do with any sort of affirmation of "adulthood". That's a very archaic notion.

Marriage, more often than not, usually leads to children, so I'm not sure it's archaic. When I was single, I only had to look out for and take care of myself. When I got married, I had to look out and take care of someone else. That's a responsibility that's only grown with children. I do think there is a certain maturity that only comes with and as a result of marriage. It is, after all, why we let adults get married, but not children.

 

[anitram]

I'm not sure why it's insulting to say that there's a significant difference between two people who are casually (or even not-casually) dating, and two people who have made a legal commitment to each other.

Put aside casual dating, the couples who live together in common-law relationships have, de facto, made those same legal commitments to each other.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Marriage, more often than not, usually leads to children, so I'm not sure it's archaic. When I was single, I only had to look out for and take care of myself. When I got married, I had to look out and take care of someone else. That's a responsibility that's only grown with children. I do think there is a certain maturity that only comes with and as a result of marriage. It is, after all, why we let adults get married, but not children.

Well that's your experience and that's great. But I know for sure that there are plenty of selfish and immature spouses and parents. Marriage or parenthood do not automatically lead to maturity, selflessness, or a sense of responsibility. If it did well there would be more successful and long lasting marriages (with less infidelity), and better parenting.

 

[anitram]

When I was single, I only had to look out for and take care of myself. When I got married, I had to look out and take care of someone else.

Except that you conveniently omit a wide range of relationships between those two extremes.

And I am sure that you are smart enough to know that you don't need to have a marriage certificate and a ring to look out for and take care of someone else (whatever that means for you).

 

[nathan1977]

Except that you conveniently omit a wide range of relationships between those two extremes.

Not conveniently avoiding anything -- however, only one type of relationship carries an explicit legal obligation, complete with legal ramifications if one party is unable to meet (or wishes to get out of) said obligations.

Marriages, like automobiles, guns, and machinery, are licensed -- presumably, to try to ensure a certain degree of responsibility on the part of those who want to enter into said institution. And the fact that so many people try to avoid it (or get out of it) could be seen as a sign of its importance.

 

[PhilsFan]

Not conveniently avoiding anything -- however, only one type of relationship carries an explicit legal obligation, complete with legal ramifications if one party is unable to meet (or wishes to get out of) said obligations.

You clearly didn't read the part of his post where he got rights equal to marriage without actually marrying.

 

[anitram]

however, only one type of relationship carries an explicit legal obligation, complete with legal ramifications if one party is unable to meet (or wishes to get out of) said obligations.

That is just not true in my jurisdiction.

 

[blueeyedgirl]

Not conveniently avoiding anything -- however, only one type of relationship carries an explicit legal obligation, complete with legal ramifications if one party is unable to meet (or wishes to get out of) said obligations.

In Australia, defacto couples have the same rights under the law as married couples. Dunno where you live

 

[nathan1977]

In Australia, defacto couples have the same rights under the law as married couples. Dunno where you live

I understand that things are different for Australia, but the article is specifically written within an American context. In America, the definition of a common law marriage varies from state to state, and many states don't recognize them at all (though all states have to recognize common-law marriages contracted in jurisdictions that do recognize them).

What's interesting is that merely cohabitating doesn't qualify a couple to be common-law married; in order to qualify as a common-law marriage, the couple generally has to conform to some combination of the following criteria:

A) legal age (16 and up, generally);
B) public recognition of the existence of the marriage (referring to/introducing each other as husband and wife, etc);
C) intent to be married;
D) exclusivity.

So even in common-law marriage, there are various legal criteria that have to be met in order to qualify as a legally married relationship, including the intent to be married. Which lends credence to the notion that marriage is, indeed, a unique union.

 

[Canadiens1131]

As pointed out earlier in the thread, it is truly fascinating that people who seem to have the least amount of resources to spread around a family seem to start a family sooner, and make it larger.

22 year old girls with daddy issues dating guys with the same type of behavior, popping out two or three kids who will probably get molested by their mum's boyfriends, and then the kids grow up damaged and keep the abuse cycle going.

My hypothetical future benevolent dictatorship would have Reproductive Licenses, just sayin'.

 

[nathan1977]

As pointed out earlier in the thread, it is truly fascinating that people who seem to have the least amount of resources to spread around a family seem to start a family sooner, and make it larger.

Which to me makes this much more of a socio-economic issue of class disparity than a referendum on the obsoleteness (or not) of marriage.

 

[anitram]

What's interesting is that merely cohabitating doesn't qualify a couple to be common-law married; in order to qualify as a common-law marriage, the couple generally has to conform to some combination of the following criteria:

A) legal age (16 and up, generally);
B) public recognition of the existence of the marriage (referring to/introducing each other as husband and wife, etc);
C) intent to be married;
D) exclusivity.

Is this generally true of U.S. jurisdictions? I am unfamiliar with state family law.

It's certainly completely untrue up north. There is no intent to marry whatsoever (frankly I find that to be constitutionally questionable). Same goes for exclusivity (another completely stupid requirement if you ask me - do we require married couples to be faithful in order to be legally married?)

 

[nathan1977]

Is this generally true of U.S. jurisdictions? I am unfamiliar with state family law.

Generally, yeah. I was actually surprised, as I assumed (erroneously) that common law only required a couple to live together for a set amount of time. Apparently it's a bit more complicated than that.

You wacky Canadians though, with your unlocked doors and chocolate rivers... ;-)

 

[anitram]

Then I think we're just talking past each other because there is a clear cultural distinction between Americans and probably most, if not all, Western European nations and Canada/Australia.

I am personally not opposed to marriage, but I am not dying to get married either. To me, I could go either way - if my partner really wanted to get married, I would likely do so because either way I don't find it an onerous thing. But if we lived together forever, that would not bother me either. I don't have strong feelings about it.

I do have a real problem with most weddings and I find it really absurd and perplexing that people are willing to spend $20, 30, 40K+ on some boring banquet hall and dry chicken. 95% of weddings are exactly the same (even if the couple thinks theirs was unique - trust me, it really wasn't to the rest of us), completely uninspiring to me and I absolutely refuse to have one like them. There are about 96,000 things I would rather do with my money.

 

[nathan1977]

Then I think we're just talking past each other because there is a clear cultural distinction between Americans and probably most, if not all, Western European nations and Canada/Australia.

Indeed.

I do have a real problem with most weddings and I find it really absurd and perplexing that people are willing to spend $20, 30, 40K+ on some boring banquet hall and dry chicken. 95% of weddings are exactly the same (even if the couple thinks theirs was unique - trust me, it really wasn't to the rest of us), completely uninspiring to me and I absolutely refuse to have one like them. There are about 96,000 things I would rather do with my money.

I think the meaning is what you and your invited guests bring to it. My wife and I were fortunate (and smart) to avoid a lot of the bullshit that generally accompanies weddings. We kept the invite list small, the costs low (we were poor kids) and considered ours a party for us and our closest friends, a group of people who we wanted to be there when we said our "I do"s. It's remarkable what the memories of that day hold for us; my dad prayed a powerful prayer of blessing over us, and it was certainly a meaningful day in the progress of our relationship. Ironically, ten years later we live on the opposite side of the country and don't have relationships with a lot of those people anymore, so we're doing a ten-year vows renewal next summer, that'll be a party for the people who are in our lives now. It'll be way cheaper though.

 

[A stor]

The same for my husband and I. A nice chapel wedding and dinner, that was it. We were poor kids too. We are still married over 27 years.

 

[Liesje]

I do not think marriage is becoming obsolete, no.

For me personally, if I am in a committed, exclusive relationship then marriage just makes sense because of the "protection" that comes with it. Health insurance, life insurance, family medical leave, other benefits/cutbacks (Phil got a nice discount on his ed classes because I work for the college)....these things that we can't assign to a live-in partner, only a spouse. Nathan has already explained how it works. I don't mean that to sound shallow, for me marriage just made sense. In college I had a friend who was going to move in with me (before I was married) and then her fiancee found out he was being deployed in Afghanistan so they got married and she moved into his home instead. She's not the only woman I know that got married to their fiancee sooner because of military deployment and the protection and financial security that comes with being married to a soldier but not being engaged to one.

And I agree with Martina on the wedding thing, though I think a lot of that has to do with opportunity. Daddy not putting a price point on the wedding vs. those who pay for it themselves (along with student loans, down payment for a first home, etc). I think I spent less on my wedding than my camera and if I could do it over again I would make it even more simple (a BBQ on the beach). Plenty of people easily get married on a dime because that's the only choice there is. My biggest expensive was photography and even so I purchased the digital images and did all the post processing myself. My favorite photo is of my late grandma and I and just that photo alone is worth the entire cost of the wedding to me.

 

[anitram]

I think I spent less on my wedding than my camera and if I could do it over again I would make it even more simple (a BBQ on the beach).

One of the best weddings I've been to was a BBQ in a barn at the family farm. I spent a couple of days with the bride baking cupcakes and that was my favourite memory of it.

 

[yolland]

Ross Douthat (opinion), New York Times, Dec. 6

...This week, the National Marriage Project is releasing a study charting the decline of the two-parent family among what it calls the “moderately educated middle”—the 58% of Americans with high school diplomas and often some college education, but no four-year degree.

This decline is depressing, but it isn’t surprising. We’ve known for a while that America has a marriage gap: college graduates divorce infrequently and bear few children out of wedlock, while in the rest of the country unwed parenthood and family breakdown are becoming a new normal. This gap has been one of the paradoxes of the culture war: highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.

But the Marriage Project’s data suggest that this paradox is fading. It’s no longer clear that middle America does hold more conservative views on marriage and family, or that educated Americans are still more likely to be secular and socially liberal. That division held a generation ago, but now it’s diminishing. In the 1970s, for instance, college-educated Americans overwhelmingly supported liberal divorce laws, while the rest of the country was ambivalent. Likewise, college graduates were much less likely than high school graduates to say that premarital sex was “always wrong.” Flash forward to the 2000s, though, and college graduates have grown more socially conservative on both fronts (50% now favor making divorces harder to get, up from 34% in the age of key parties), while the least educated Americans have become more permissive. There has been a similar change in religious practice. In the 1970s, college-educated Americans were slightly less likely to attend church than high school graduates. Today, piety increasingly correlates with education: college graduates are America’s most faithful churchgoers, while religious observance has dropped precipitously among the less-educated.

In part, these shifts may be a testament to the upward mobility of religious believers. America’s college-educated population probably looks more conservative and (relatively speaking) more religious because religious conservatives have become better educated. Evangelical Christians, in particular, are now one of America’s best-educated demographics, as likely to enroll their children in an SAT prep course as they are to ship them off to Bible camp. This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class—pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club.

But as religious conservatives have climbed the educational ladder, American churches seem to be having trouble reaching the people left behind. This is bad news for both Christianity and the country. The reinforcing bonds of strong families and strong religious communities have been crucial to working-class prosperity in America. Yet today, no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of stabilizing role in the lives of the “moderately educated middle” (let alone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic Church played among the ethnic working class. As a result, the long-running culture war arguments about how to structure family life (Should marriage be reserved for heterosexuals? Is abstinence or “safe sex” the most responsible way to navigate the premarital landscape?) look increasingly irrelevant further down the educational ladder, where sex and child-rearing often take place in the absence of any social structures at all.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

NY Times

December 31, 2010
The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage
By TARA PARKER-POPE

A lasting marriage does not always signal a happy marriage. Plenty of miserable couples have stayed together for children, religion or other practical reasons.

But for many couples, it’s just not enough to stay together. They want a relationship that is meaningful and satisfying. In short, they want a sustainable marriage.

“The things that make a marriage last have more to do with communication skills, mental health, social support, stress — those are the things that allow it to last or not,” says Arthur Aron, a psychology professor who directs the Interpersonal Relationships Laboratory at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “But those things don’t necessarily make it meaningful or enjoyable or sustaining to the individual.”

The notion that the best marriages are those that bring satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first?

Not anymore. For centuries, marriage was viewed as an economic and social institution, and the emotional and intellectual needs of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage itself. But in modern relationships, people are looking for a partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more interesting.

Caryl Rusbult, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam who died last January, called it the “Michelangelo effect,” referring to the manner in which close partners “sculpt” each other in ways that help each of them attain valued goals.

Dr. Aron and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, have studied how individuals use a relationship to accumulate knowledge and experiences, a process called “self-expansion.” Research shows that the more self-expansion people experience from their partner, the more committed and satisfied they are in the relationship.

To measure this, Dr. Lewandowski developed a series of questions for couples: How much has being with your partner resulted in your learning new things? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person?

While the notion of self-expansion may sound inherently self-serving, it can lead to stronger, more sustainable relationships, Dr. Lewandowski says.

“If you’re seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position,” he explains. “And being able to help your partner’s self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself.”

The concept explains why people are delighted when dates treat them to new experiences, like a weekend away. But self-expansion isn’t just about exotic experiences. Individuals experience personal growth through their partners in big and small ways. It happens when they introduce new friends, or casually talk about a new restaurant or a fascinating story in the news.

The effect of self-expansion is particularly pronounced when people first fall in love. In research at the University of California at Santa Cruz, 325 undergraduate students were given questionnaires five times over 10 weeks. They were asked, “Who are you today?” and given three minutes to describe themselves. They were also asked about recent experiences, including whether they had fallen in love.

After students reported falling in love, they used more varied words in their self-descriptions. The new relationships had literally broadened the way they looked at themselves.

“You go from being a stranger to including this person in the self, so you suddenly have all of these social roles and identities you didn’t have before,” explains Dr. Aron, who co-authored the research. “When people fall in love that happens rapidly, and it’s very exhilarating.”

Over time, the personal gains from lasting relationships are often subtle. Having a partner who is funny or creative adds something new to someone who isn’t. A partner who is an active community volunteer creates new social opportunities for a spouse who spends long hours at work.

Additional research suggests that spouses eventually adopt the traits of the other — and become slower to distinguish differences between them, or slower to remember which skills belong to which spouse.

In experiments by Dr. Aron, participants rated themselves and their partners on a variety of traits, like “ambitious” or “artistic.” A week later, the subjects returned to the lab and were shown the list of traits and asked to indicate which ones described them.

People responded the quickest to traits that were true of both them and their partner. When the trait described only one person, the answer came more slowly. The delay was measured in milliseconds, but nonetheless suggested that when individuals were particularly close to someone, their brains were slower to distinguish between their traits and those of their spouses.

“It’s easy to answer those questions if you’re both the same,” Dr. Lewandowski explains. “But if it’s just true of you and not of me, then I have to sort it out. It happens very quickly, but I have to ask myself, ‘Is that me or is that you?’ ”

It’s not that these couples lost themselves in the marriage; instead, they grew in it. Activities, traits and behaviors that had not been part of their identity before the relationship were now an essential part of how they experienced life.

All of this can be highly predictive for a couple’s long-term happiness. One scale designed by Dr. Aron and colleagues depicts seven pairs of circles. The first set is side by side. With each new set, the circles begin to overlap until they are nearly on top of one another. Couples choose the set of circles that best represents their relationship. In a 2009 report in the journal Psychological Science, people bored in their marriages were more likely to choose the more separate circles. Partners involved in novel and interesting experiences together were more likely to pick one of the overlapping circles and less likely to report boredom. “People have a fundamental motivation to improve the self and add to who they are as a person,” Dr. Lewandowski says. “If your partner is helping you become a better person, you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship.”

 

[VintagePunk]

Interesting, thanks for posting, Mrs S. Dr. Aron is very respected in the field.

I once had a social psych prof who claimed he could predict with very high accuracy, something like 95%, which couples would still be together in 10 years, after spending an hour with them.