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A study released in 2011 by The National Marriage Project out of the University of Virginia got a lot of press with headlines such as Generous couples have happier marriages, The Generous Marriage, and The Five Secrets of Happily Married Parents. Who knew?!
The short version of the study is that generosity makes for much better marriages, but good sex is even more important than generosity. It kind of feels like validation for me – what with decades of ranting about sex and generosity! Religious faith was also associated with good marriages.
I’ve downloaded the full report and will be digesting it and tossing out some of the good bits over the next few days. The report, titled When Baby Makes Three, the 2011 State of Our Unions is from the National Marriage Project. The study was designed to look at how children affect a couple’s relationship. It found that “the experience of parenthood varies by the outcome studies, family size, the relationship of the parent, and the beliefs of the parents.” The study showed that “parenthood is typically associated with lower levels of marital happiness” but that for a “substantial minority of husbands and wives” being parents was not “an obstacle to marital happiness.” They identified ten things that “seemed to boost men and women’s odds of successfully combining marriage and parenthood.“
In short, they found that for most couples adding kids reduced marital happiness and raised marital conflict, but that for a sizeable subset of couples, this was NOT the case. It seems to me that the reasons some couples can have kids and a happy marriage are things we all need to know and build into our marriages!
Before moving on to the marriage parts of the study, I want to point out one very important finding of the study. The authors said, “we found that married parents generally experienced more individual happiness and less depression than unmarried parents…“. In a world that often sees fathers as unnecessary, this is important news. We’ve already seen studies that show both boys and girls are better off with a mother and a father, and now we learn that those who parent as couples are better off than single parents. Society has declared married parenting to be old-fashioned, but that doesn’t negate the harm that single parenting does to children and parents alike.
[This post first appeared as two posts on Dec 14 and 15, 2011.]
A post worth reading:
the art of non-conformity | 3 Good Reasons to Change Your Mind ◄ Indeed!
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God and generosity, yes, but I think that ours is not the only marriage in which the absence of sex made hearts grow fonder. It just didn’t work.
Coincidentally, the word prompt for this week’s Five Minute Friday Christian blog linkup is ‘generous’; the idea is to write for no more than five minutes on that word, no rewrites, no edits. Here’s the link:
https://fiveminutefriday.com/2022/09/08/fmf-writing-prompt-link-up-generous/