Premarital Relationship Length and Long-Term Marriage Success

Introduction: The Question of Courtship Length

Reading the divorce statistics today, one might almost think that a person has a better chance of winning the lottery than of staying married. This is true despite the fact that nearly everyone who gets married at least hopes that the relationship will endure. Given the rate at which marriages fail and the competing desire for individuals to have their own marriages succeed, it is vital that there be accurate research about what helps certain relationships to be successful. Such research can be used in two distinct ways by people who are thinking of getting married. First, a potential couple could assess themselves and their relationship using the criteria laid out by researchers and determine whether they more closely resemble those who have succeeded in marriage or those who have not. Second, a potential couple could examine the literature and determine whether there is anything that successful couples habitually do that they do not, and change their own behavior accordingly. In marriage, as in all other forms of human behavior, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the good form of communication.

Of course, there are an infinite number of possible variations in terms of what allows one pair of people to live together in relative harmony for fifty years while others are filing for divorce six weeks after the rehearsal dinner. There are, however, also meaningful similarities among those relationships that succeed and those that fail. This paper examines one of the factors believed to be key in assessing the probability that a marital relationship will succeed over the long term: the length of time a couple has been together before marriage. In general, the literature on this subject suggests that a short premarital relationship — one lasting three months or less — is a predictor of a higher likelihood of marital failure compared to one that springs from a longer, more established relationship. It must be emphasized that this is not true in every case, and that both individual factors (such as emotional maturity and commitment) and larger factors (such as religious beliefs and cultural understandings of marriage) play an enormous role in determining how predictive a short premarital relationship actually is.

There are a range of attributes suggestive of a stable marital relationship. It should be noted that while the phrase "marital relationship" is used throughout, the same statements can generally be made about other long-term committed relationships, such as same-sex civil commitments or same-sex marriages where they are legally recognized. Some of these attributes are true — or not — of individuals, and some are true — or not — of couples as a unit. Some are under the control of the individuals concerned, and some are not.

In general, people who are involved with each other for only a short period of time before they marry — defined here as three months or less — are less likely to stay married than those who have a longer relationship before marriage. There are some exceptions to this statement, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there are limitations to it. Marriage is as much a cultural enterprise as it is an individual one — arguably more so — and thus one's expectations of the nature of the marriage contract are heavily influenced by the culture or cultures in which one was raised.

A number of cultures today have either arranged or near-arranged marriages. In such cultural systems, the people getting married generally do not know each other for a long time or intimately before they marry. In such cases, the lack of a long acquaintanceship before marriage is not necessarily predictive of a poor marital outcome. This should make intuitive sense: if one is raised with the expectation that one will marry someone whom one's family has ascertained to be an appropriate mate, and one knows that one is expected to remain in that marriage, then divorce is relatively unlikely. The marriage may also in fact be a relatively happy one. However, the focus of this paper is on American marriages, for which arranged or family-directed marriages are not the norm.

General Attributes Predictive of a Stable Marriage

Some traits are generally predictive of a high chance of success for a long-term relationship independent of how long the premarital relationship lasted. However, traits that are helpful to the success of all long-term relationships are especially helpful — and potentially even necessary — for marriages that arise from a short premarital relationship. Marriages based on short premarital relationships are, in a sense, handicapped by that particular circumstance, making it essential that the couple have as many other positive factors as possible working in their favor. A short premarital period can, to some extent, be compensated for by factors such as high self-esteem in both partners, since self-esteem is largely independent of the length of the premarital relationship. Good communication skills can also compensate for a short courtship, though they are only partly independent of relationship length, since effective communication arises both from individual attributes and from the cumulative experience of building healthy communicative habits with another person over time.

One insight that emerged clearly during the research for this paper is that the relationship between premarital courtship length and marital success is, in many ways, a chicken-and-egg problem. Certain traits are associated with the ability to maintain a long-term relationship, and certain traits are also associated with the tendency to rush into marriage — and these two sets of traits are connected in complex ways.

One of the major values of research into predictors of successful long-term marriage is that by identifying what makes marriages last, one can help couples better assess their own chances of marital success (Larson, 2000, p. 27). There is, of course, no way to reduce the probability of marital success to a few cut-and-dried rules. No marriage preceded by a courtship of under three months will automatically fail; human relationships are simply not that predictable or that simple. However, there are good predictors of what allows many long-term relationships to succeed. Some of those predictors arise from relatively stable, unchanging aspects of a person's character — such as self-esteem — while others arise within the context of a particular relationship and therefore change over a person's lifetime.

How much one tends to idealize one's partner is a trait that can have a substantial effect on the probability of a successful long-term marriage. Those individuals most likely to idealize their partners are also most likely to be disappointed, and they also appear to be most likely to move quickly from first meeting to marriage. As Niehuis, Skogrand, and Huston (2006) summarize, drawing on Waller's earlier work:

Waller assumed that courting couples are generally blissful, optimistic lovers who, in order to sustain their romance, draw attention to their desirable qualities, suppress thoughts and behaviors that might weaken their romance, and try to see the best in the other person. After they are married, however, spouses may no longer be as motivated to "put their best foot forward" to impress their marriage partners; moreover, the intimacy of marriage makes sustaining such idealized images difficult. When idealized images give way to more realistic ones and the intense romance of early marriage weakens, as it usually does, marriage partners may be disappointed by the changes.

Honeymoon Periods

Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, it is interesting to note that Niehuis and colleagues found that both a very short and a very long courtship were generally predictive of a poor prospect for long-term marital happiness. Their explanation — one with which this paper agrees — is rooted in the feelings that arise during the premarital experience itself. Much of what determines a marriage's possible success comes to light, or is actively produced, during the premarital relationship. Too many people, when they fall in love, do not consider how what they are feeling and thinking in that moment will influence the possible success or failure of the marriage (Larson, 2000, p. 37).

Niehuis and colleagues (2002) also found seemingly contradictory results: partners were likely to experience a steeper decline in affection during the first two years of marriage when the couple had dated for either a shorter or longer than average period (27 months) and when their courtship was driven by either extreme or very little passion. They explain two distinct courtship experiences that lead to this outcome. In the first, some premarital partners blindly rush into marriage because of very passionate but short courtships, and then experience a loss of affection early in marriage as they make discoveries about their partner and the quality of their relationship. A short premarital relationship is all too conducive to allowing people to ignore differences as they float along in the hormone-induced euphoria that attends the first months of a relationship.

Neurological research provides a compelling biological basis for this phenomenon. A study by Marazziti and Canale (2004) found measurable hormonal differences in individuals who had recently fallen in love compared to control subjects. Crucially, when participants were assessed again 12 to 18 months later — after they reported feeling calmer and no longer "obsessed" with their partner — their hormone levels were indistinguishable from those of the control group. The researchers concluded:

Our study would suggest that falling in love represents a "physiological" and transient condition which is characterized (or underlaid) by peculiar hormonal patterns (Marazziti & Canale, 2004, p. 294).

These findings accord with what many people have experienced in their own lives: the first few weeks and months of being in love feel dramatically different from ordinary life, and as such should not serve as the primary basis for making decisions about long-term relationships.

Among the most important traits predictive of a healthy long-term relationship is high self-esteem. This might seem counter-intuitive — that thinking well of oneself is conducive to having a healthy relationship with someone else. It is important to distinguish between feeling good about oneself and feeling superior to others. The more one considers it, however, the clearer it becomes that genuine self-esteem is indeed beneficial for relationships: being secure in oneself makes it far easier not to be critical of other people. A high level of self-esteem allows one, in general, to be more tolerant and generous toward others and more supportive of one's partner (Larson, 2000, p. 119).

Conclusion: Take Your Time

Couples who spend longer than three months courting each other are, in general, more likely to have a successful long-term relationship. This is not universally true, as noted throughout this paper. If the individuals concerned come from a culture in which only a short courtship — or no courtship at all — is the norm, then the findings reported here are essentially irrelevant to their situation. It is also true that some couples succeed in long-term marriages despite having known each other only superficially before marrying (Showers & Zeigler-Hill, 2004, p. 1206).