disallusioned42

I completely agree with you. I used to be in a very similar situation. I made about the same amount of money (quite a few years ago when it would have been worth a good bit more than today). I had a very similar experience. I lived paycheck to paycheck with nothing extra in the bank. Any unforeseen expense generated significant stress. It was not a fun experience. I can totally sympathize and agree that it feels miserable. But I cannot agree with the implications this article is making.

I was able to turn my situation around, not by getting tax cuts or help from the government, but by changing my lifestyle and my idea of what I needed. That house that you think you can afford that sets you back 20% of your gross pay? You don't need it. Cut your residence costs to something reasonable like 10% of of gross pay and boom, you magically have a surplus of ~$800 / month. That $400 - $500 / month car payment? You don't need that either. Stash away four months of the savings we just got on our residence and buy a used clunker for $3200, drive that into the ground, and by the time that dies, you will have saved up enough money to buy a perfectly fine used car for cash.

I have an artist friend who lives in NYC on ~$30k / year. She even has a car, which is an expense that a lot of people in NYC do without. Even in this situation she has been able to consistently put money away into savings and investments because she manages her money well. It's not about how much you make. Your choices have far more to do with it than most people are willing to admit.

People are more important than promises. The only reason we value promises is because they make life in general better for people. I've personally experienced and seen multiple others in the situation where ending the marriage really truly was the best thing for both parties. In these cases, your strict adherence to word/contract is patently absurd and creates nothing but pain and suffering.

My comment is intended to be taken broadly on average. Based on what you say here, I would agree with you that staying married might have been a better choice in your specific situation.

I'm assuming that most people are more interested in happy marriages than stable ones (at least before they've made the commitment). Now the marriage traditionalists might not. (This seems to be supported by at least one or two of the people posting here. But at the same time, one of them still mentions "happily-ever-after".) Even going back to the Declaration of Independence we see "pursuit of happiness" mentioned prominently in even those much more conservative times. Going significantly farther back than that I can start to see how "stable" might be significant, but in this day and age "happy" seems like a safe bet.

On the other side we have the word "divorce", which everyone agrees means "definitely unhappy". However, "not divorced" is definitely not a sufficient condition for "happy". The word "stable" is in the middle and can go either way. In one sense I agree it has a strong similarity to "not divorced". But in another sense, I think a lot of people read "stable marriage" as being very similar to "happy marriage". So to the extent that stable == happy, it's missing the point of the actual stats. And to the extent that stable != happy and a good proxy for not divorced, it's missing the point of what people really want out of life (and marriage).

This brings us to your response to my other comment, and there I think you're right on the money. The purpose of marriage is the main issue here. In my mind, the traditional view is synonymous with "stable" and not getting divorced. And the fact that the OP is talking about "stable" and "divorce" in the way it is suggests that the traditional view of marriage is a strong influence (although maybe my religious background is biasing me here). But none of this is very relevant if "happy" is what people are really after.

The article's title is "What makes for a stable marriage?". I think most reasonable people would agree that lack of divorce does not make "a stable marriage", so yes, the article is missing the point as declared by its title. Can I construct definitions for all these things that make the article self-consistent? Sure. But that's not very useful in the real world, which is what I mean by "missing the point".

Yes, I agree that commitment has value. But the standard view promulgated my many religions (and expressed in some of the comments here) that marriage should be almost non-negotiably for life takes this WAY too far. I don't know where the balance is, but I am positive that it is nowhere near where tradition places it.

Yeah, that's definitely a common reason. But I actually feel that it's one of the worst ones, and that kids would be much better off if the parents calmly explaining their decision to the kids in a positive way, thereby sparing them the pain, conflict, and at the very least unhapiness that staying together would likely bring.

For the record, I did that. And from the inside it appeared to work. For years I thought I was happy and had a fantastic marriage. But it still didn't prevent us from ultimately coming to the conclusion that staying married was not the best thing for either of us. Now I'm agnostic and MUCH happier.

> Everyone who gets married knows that the possibility of divorce exists and roughly what divorce proceedings entail.

On the contrary, I had absolutely no idea how difficult divorce proceedings were when I got married. Maybe I was just naive and living in a bubble, but it was a very real shock to me that, since our divorce was amiable, my wife and I couldn't just go in to the courthouse and tell them we didn't want to be married any more. Instead the legal system forces an adversarial process on you.

Maybe this was just because my religious ideals caused me to not even consider divorce as an option. But even then, it's a very real thing and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person to have been in that boat.

This is a fascinating topic to me. I read it with great interest, and I might even go and do a bunch of my own analysis of the data. But I can't help but think that in a way the whole thing deeply misses the point. My skepticism started when I got to the third point: "How often you go to church". The results seem obvious to me. In general, churches frown on divorce, so of course church goers are going to have lower divorce rates! But that's irrelevant if the result is that a bunch of people are miserable because they're staying in marriages that make them unhappy. I used to be a regular church goer and I absolutely saw this. People would stay in miserable marriages because they thought it was the right thing to do.

So I hypothesize that what really matters is not divorce rate, but happy marriage rate. Unfortunately that data is not in this study. And furthermore, if it was, I would suspect significant bias. In the church world that I was a part of there was significant pressure to keep up appearances. So I don't think you would be able to trust either the married persons' self assessment of happiness nor the external assessment of the people who know them.

With this new metric in mind, I went back and re-thought the logic in each of the OP's significant predictors. First stop, "How much money you make". IMO this one falls flat on its face. It's easy to imagine situations where someone would stay in an unhappy marriage just because their partner has money. It's also easy to imagine situations where someone makes a lot of money, but stays in an unhappy marriage because their partner would get half of it in a divorce. Another factor that I think is suspect is "How many people attended the wedding". When a lot of people saw you get married it seems like there might be more pressure to stay in an unhappy marriage to save face to all the people who attended your wedding. I'm a little bit less confident about the reasoning here, but it still seems plausible.

The rest of the predictors seem reasonable to me, especially "How long you were dating". This one stands up under the happiness test and just seems to make sense, provided that the extended dating years were as similar as possible to the married years, minus the marriage license.