Here is an important but perhaps counter-intuitive truth for Valentine’s Day: Having had lots of romantic relationships is not a good preparation for a happy marriage.
That was one of the takeaways from last week’s post The Myths about Cohabitation and Late Marriage, which included a quote by University of Denver psychology Galena Rhoades: “We generally think that having more experience is better…. But what we find for relationships is just the opposite. Having more experience is related to having a less happy marriage later on.”
Intrigued by that statement, I looked for its source, which turned out to be a report by Dr. Rhoades and her colleague Dr. Scott M. Stanley entitled Before “I Do”: What Do Premarital Experiences Have to Do with Marital Quality Among Today’s Young Adults? This recounted the results of research sponsored by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which is no bastion of cultural conservatism. The study was published in 2014, but I don’t think it received the attention it deserves.
Traditionally, the researchers observe, the pattern was this: “courtship led to marriage, which led to sex, cohabitation, and children.” Today, when 90% of couples have sex before they get married and four in ten babies are born to unmarried parents, the pattern is more like: courtship that leads to sex, cohabitation, children, and finally (sometimes) marriage.
The research focused on these questions:
Do our premarital experiences, both with others and our future spouse, affect our marital happiness and stability down the line? Do our prior romantic entanglements harm our chances of marital bliss? And once we find “the one,” do the choices we make and experiences we have together as a couple before and on the big day influence our ability to have a successful marriage?
The findings are wide-ranging and the entire report is worth reading. It includes some fascinating data about the impact of weddings on successful marriages that I’ll blog about tomorrow. But I want to focus here on the report’s finding that “Our past experiences, especially when it comes to love, sex, and children, are linked to our future marital quality.” Here are some of the findings:
(1) The more sexual partners that a woman had previously, the less happy she was in her current marriage. Unless, that is, her experience of pre-marital sex was with the man whom she eventually marries. Then the negative effects go away. (This would seem to accord with the Biblical texts that define marriage in terms of the “one flesh” sexual union, rather than the formal covenant itself, as important as that is.)
(2) Cohabitation brings down the quality measures of a marriage (a determined by reports of happiness, satisfaction, divorce rate, etc.). But the effect is especially strong when a person has previously lived together with someone else whom they didn’t marry. And the more partners they lived with, only to eventually move out, the less satisfaction they felt when they finally did marry someone.
The report speculates as to why more “experience” translates into more problems in a marriage:
As a whole, these findings demonstrate that having more relationships prior to marriage is related to lower marital quality. In some ways, that seems counterintuitive: Why would having more experience be associated with worse outcomes? We generally operate under the assumption that people with more experience, in a job, for example, are experts and therefore better than novices or new hires. Shouldn’t having more relationship experience also make people wiser in their love lives?
One reason that more experience could lead to lower marital quality is that more experience may increase one’s awareness of alternative partners. A strong sense of alternatives is believed to make it harder to maintain commitment to, and satisfaction with, what one already has (Rusbult & Buunk, 1993; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). People who have had many relationships prior to their current one can compare a present partner to their prior partners in many areas—like conflict management, dating style, physical attractiveness, sexual skills, communication ability, and so on. Marriage involves leaving behind other options, which may be harder to do with a lot of experience.
Having had more relationship experiences prior to marriage also means more experience breaking up. A history of multiple breakups may make people take a more jaundiced view of love and relationships.
The researchers hasten to say that having these negative predictors does not mean that one’s marriage is doomed or that marital happiness and satisfaction is impossible. They recommend that the couple communicate with each other and make intentional decisions about their marriage.
And I was struck by this bit of advice:
Finally, rituals and community matter. . . .Many couples would do well to consider ways to be more connected, as couples, with others in the community. Maintaining important friendships and family connections, making new friends together, and getting involved in the community may enhance a couple’s relationship in multiple ways (Amato, Booth, Johnson, & Rogers, 2007).
Like maybe getting involved with a church?
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