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Statisticians Uncover What Makes For a Stable Marriage
HughPickens.com writes Randy Olson, a Computer Science grad student who works with data visualizations, writes about seven of the biggest factors that predict what makes for a long term stable marriage in America. Olson took the results of a study that polled thousands of recently married and divorced Americans and and asked them dozens of questions about their marriage (PDF): How long they were dating, how long they were engaged, etc. After running this data through a multivariate model, the authors were able to calculate the factors that best predicted whether a marriage would end in divorce. "What struck me about this study is that it basically laid out what makes for a stable marriage in the US," writes Olson. Here are some of the biggest factors:
How long you were dating: (Couples who dated 1-2 years before their engagement were 20% less likely to end up divorced than couples who dated less than a year before getting engaged. Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced.); How much money you make: (The more money you and your partner make, the less likely you are to ultimately file for divorce. Couples who earn $125K per year are 51% less likely to divorce than couples making 0 — 25k); How often you go to church: (Couples who never go to church are 2x more likely to divorce than regular churchgoers.); Your attitude toward your partner: (Men are 1.5x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner's looks, and women are 1.6x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner's wealth.); How many people attended the wedding: ("Crazy enough, your wedding ceremony has a huge impact on the long-term stability of your marriage. Perhaps the biggest factor is how many people attend your wedding: Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people."); How much you spent on the wedding: (The more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you'll end up divorced.); Whether you had a honeymoon: (Couples who had a honeymoon are 41% less likely to divorce than those who had no honeymoon)
Of course correlation is not causation. For example, expensive weddings may simply attract the kind of immature and narcissistic people who are less likely to sustain a successful marriage and such people might end up getting divorced even if they married cheaply. But "the particularly scary part here is that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is well over $30,000," says Olson, "which doesn't bode well for the future of American marriages."
How long you were dating: (Couples who dated 1-2 years before their engagement were 20% less likely to end up divorced than couples who dated less than a year before getting engaged. Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced.); How much money you make: (The more money you and your partner make, the less likely you are to ultimately file for divorce. Couples who earn $125K per year are 51% less likely to divorce than couples making 0 — 25k); How often you go to church: (Couples who never go to church are 2x more likely to divorce than regular churchgoers.); Your attitude toward your partner: (Men are 1.5x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner's looks, and women are 1.6x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner's wealth.); How many people attended the wedding: ("Crazy enough, your wedding ceremony has a huge impact on the long-term stability of your marriage. Perhaps the biggest factor is how many people attend your wedding: Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people."); How much you spent on the wedding: (The more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you'll end up divorced.); Whether you had a honeymoon: (Couples who had a honeymoon are 41% less likely to divorce than those who had no honeymoon)
Of course correlation is not causation. For example, expensive weddings may simply attract the kind of immature and narcissistic people who are less likely to sustain a successful marriage and such people might end up getting divorced even if they married cheaply. But "the particularly scary part here is that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is well over $30,000," says Olson, "which doesn't bode well for the future of American marriages."
What is the point of a piece of paper? (Other than to get your partner under your health insurance coverage, the merits of which are debatable.)
stallion prick is long and thick
Really...with 1000 dollars you can already have a luxury wedding in the Phillipines. Plus, you are already on your destination honeymoon.
It's just another ridiculous christian tradition.
Narcissists and/or people in it for wealth/beauty only in a partner don't fare well in a marriage? No way.
One has to admire how the social sciences continually raise (or should I say lower) the bar of ineptitude. So marriage is a good topic for them, seeing as both succeed and fail at roughly the same rate, which in fact fairly matches that of random chance.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
If both party's motives are pure, they should have no problem with one.
What about men caring for their wife wealth and women caring for their husband looks ? What about homosexual couple ? Also a lot of the reason given seems to boild down to the following :
* if you know somebody for a long time before getting married your marriage is more stable (less bad surprise)
* if you or your spouse has a lot of wealth invested either in the ceremony or yourself, you are less likely to "split" away and lose wealth
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The secret of successful marriage is beating the odds.
Couples where one partner says, "Well yeah, but correlation doesn't equal causation" at least three times a day are almost 100% guaranteed to end up with the death of one spouse at the hands of the other.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Your marriage will "succeed" or "fail" based on why you're getting married, period. Things come up during any relationship, but reasoning keeps things going. Look at business relationships. Look at the cultures where they have arranged marriages. The thing is, when one side tries to make it work for the sake of the relationship itself, then the other side feels this and also tries. When both sides are trying, then success. Eventually true love develops out of the pure sacredness of the effort from the other side toward your side. Each side sees personal sacrifice and feels in debt.
There is no mathematical formula for this, for the same reason that pi cannot be pinned down to a certain number.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
That was 36 years ago.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
"Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people.");"
"Whether you had a honeymoon (Couples who had a honeymoon are 41% less likely to divorce than those who had no honeymoon).""
Those two seem to be at odds with this one:
"How much you spent on the wedding (The more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you'll end up divorced.);"
Unless they mean that you should invite 200 people to a park wedding with no food, and then honeymoon in the alley behind Dunkin' Donuts to take advantage of their dumpster?
The two statements about the more expensive the wedding the greater the chance of divorce and that the larger the ceremony you have the less likely you are to end up divorced seem mutually exclusive to me.
My lady and I have been together over ten years, we have an eight year old daughter and are completely happy.
I wonder how the "Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced" extends to us if we ever got married (not that we've ever thought about it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
Trolling is a art,
The wedding data is very interesting in that eloping scored really bad, having a wedding with 200+ people really good, how much you spend on wedding bad... but since a 200+ person wedding is going to be expensive, perhaps it's good if the bride's parent's pay as opposed to the couple paying for it themselves? Anyway, these factors and the going to church factor could all be interpreted as peer pressure factors. A big wedding paid for by the parents would provide pressure both from the parents and the 200+ people who attended.
In addition, I know from a few marital situations that I have observed that having a lot of money doesn't just ease life together, it also acts as it's own pressure. At least one and likely both partners will drop in financial status in the event of divorce unless they find other partners prior to the divorce.
The question this brings up for me is whether this says good things or bad things. There is a benefit if pressure keeps a relationship together through a rough time if the relationship becomes better later. But it is a bad thing if pressure keeps a relationship together that is (often mutually) destructive.
What I'd really like to see is a study that takes the word "marriage" out of the equation, looks at romantic partnerships in general, looks at both the length and the healthiness of the relationship, and looks at the factors that got them there. From that, you could perhaps start to discover what conditions best support healthy, stable relationships which I do believe are a benefit to both those involved and society and thus worthy of pursuit.
My wife and I have been together nearly 13 years now.
Never dated, I just stopped by a few times and then moved in.
Never made over 20K a year, ever.
Never go to church (organized religion is for people who don't know how to research properly)
Only had 4 people at the wedding, preacher, witness and ourselves
Never had a honeymoon
We HAVE spent 10 years working together to be awesome individually and together. It's horrifyingly obvious to us that the couples around us have not.
Life...
"Must Be Present To Win"
I remember hearing that couples who lived together before they got married were more likely to get divorced. That never made sense to me, but new research suggest that it's actually not true:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
FWIW, my wife and I have been married for ten years and we didn't live together before then.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Just wondering how
1. The more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you'll end up divorced
and
2. How many people attended the wedding ("Crazy enough, your wedding ceremony has a huge impact on the long-term stability of your marriage. Perhaps the biggest factor is how many people attend your wedding
Would seem to be correlated. Normally the more you spend the more people you have attending the wedding ie
it costs more to have a wedding with 100 people than with 25.
So how can one lead to more stable marriages and one to less??
My wife and I have been together for ~40 years. When people ask us our secret, we say we're both too lazy to pack-up and leave.
So you have to keep in mind, the alternative to ending the marriage by divorce is to end it by death. There was a comedian in the 1980s who first planted this one in my head.
We have to ask ourselves how many of these variables also correlate with being near to death.
"How often you go to church (Couples who never go to church are 2x more likely to divorce than regular churchgoers.); " But there was another study where atheist couples are less likely to divorce (if they get married) than Christian - does this mean that Christian couples that don't go to church are most likely doomed?
This is blinging
Success of a marriage depends on whether you can find another reason than the original crush to stay together.
are statistically less prone to separation forces inherent in the system.
(A related study claims that weeks beginning with a dose of python are 42% more likely to contain mirth.)
The more people are at your wedding, the less likely you are to divorce, but the more you spend, the more likely you are to divorce.
Since cost of a wedding scales linearly with the number of attendees, it would seem the researches overlooked something. Not at all shocking with the state of modern research, though. Overlooking things seems to be the new norm in statistical research.
That has worked my wife and I. It's wonderful.
The two statements about the more expensive the wedding the greater the chance of divorce and that the larger the ceremony you have the less likely you are to end up divorced seem mutually exclusive to me.
Not necessarily. The biggest wedding I ever attended was outdoors in a natural setting, with no added decorations or frills. The reception was a BBQ. After we ate, we played "capture the flag". There were several hundred people, and the total cost was likely just a couple thousand. That was more than twenty years ago, and the couple is still married.
My wife and I did that for $2,000.00.
Church basement, simple food and booze (many folks brought their own), the guys just wore suits and my wife's wedding dress was something she picked up somewhere for less than $100 and she made her own veil. Everyone had a blast.
This nonsense of $20,000+ weddings is just ridiculous - especailly since that's a down payent on a house or knocking off a bit off your student loan or just save it for a rainy day.
. . . can be found here: http://www.amazon.de/gp/produc...
This is really a topic for psychologists and not statisticians, because, well . . . people tend to lie on questionnaires. And there is a lot more going on in marital processes than simple numbers can reveal.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There are lots of correlated variables here, so it's difficult to pick out useful information.
The comment thread on the article includes lots of discussion about the impossibility of a wedding that is both cheap and large, but lots of people pointing out that weddings with lots of church and/or community support can be both cheap and large. But church and/or community support are also correlated with other elements of a very stable social structure.
For example, my wedding was both large (> 600 people attended our reception) and cheap (< $3000). How is that possible? We're Mormon, so the actual marriage ceremony was at the LDS temple, which is free, and allows limited attendance. Then we had a wedding breakfast for the ~50 people who attended the ceremony, but the breakfast was at the church (free) and the food was cooked and served by members of our congregation (ingredients cost: low; labor: free). The reception was at the church (free); the bridesmaids paid for their own dresses, best man rented his tux, etc.; the flowers were a wedding gift from a cousin with a flower shop; the table centerpieces and other decorations were handmade by friends and relatives, so we only paid for the materials (cheap); the cake was made by my aunt, who had a wedding business on the side, and cost us $200 for a large, beautiful and tasty cake; my aunt also provided backdrops and other decorations; and some other relatives who are professional photographers did the photos. I don't recall who did the music, but it was all free, using the church's sound equipment. Our biggest expense was the hors d'oeuvres which were actually made by my wife's sisters, so we paid only for the ingredients.
The common thread throughout that list is heavy support from friends, family and community. But I suspect that deep family and church/community support are strongly correlated with long-lasting marriages for lots of reasons which have nothing to do with the wedding day, which to me suggests that those are far more relevant and that wedding cost and attendance are mere proxies for those variables. Also related is the fact that if a lot of people attend, you also get a lot of gifts. So big/cheap weddings are financially beneficial to the couple (mine sure was; spontaneous cash gifts alone -- from the "money tree" -- were more than 2X what we spent, plus all of the gifts of housewares, etc.), while small/expensive weddings are a net drain on their finances.
Similarly, long-term dating tends to be more uncommon among those who get married very young, because it takes time to date someone for 2-3 years, and it's well-known that marriages of the very young are riskier.
Elopement is another one: Those who elope are generally people who decide to get married on the spur of the moment. Such impulsiveness doesn't bode well for future decisions if your goal is long-term stability.
It would be interesting to see a study on this done well, with lots of effort put into teasing apart the correlated variables. This one doesn't actually tell us much.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Wouldn't couples who elope spend far less on weddings than couples who have 200+ people at their wedding?
From anecdotal evidence I'd say couples who elope, don't go on a honeymoon, don't make a lot of money (less than half of the $125k) and never go to church (my parents) can stay together for quite a long time (more than 30 years and counting).
Maybe things are different in South America. Or maybe they meant wedding reception instead of wedding?
Since my parents did have a wedding reception after eloping. Maybe that made up for all the other things?
at least that's how it works in Islam.
This applies chiefly to heterosexual marriage, not homosexual. Oddities like judeo-christian religions capacity to exacerbate and distort gender role do not apply to say, two married women.
Good people go to bed earlier.
My suggestion was two kegs, two pigs, and have a block party. That'd get big and cheap. Let the relatives know in advance, and they can bring sides and dessert. :)
This can really be condensed to only three, since some are redundant if you know the underlying cause. It's not like a research study is needed if you know people with successful marriages. The factors they chose that have an impact really only reflect the relevance of the following factors:
1. Taking marriage seriously. Eloping or skipping a honeymoon says "I don't want to invest much in this." Even those with moderate income can have a modest wedding and inexpensive honeymoon instead of going all out. Any indicator of not taking the marriage seriously is a negative, no matter what form it takes.
2. Genuinely valuing the other person for who they are. Hence, this means to not be a gold-digger or care more about looks. Also, dating longer is just an indicator that "finding the right person" is the attitude the person is taking, which means they want the person as a person to be a good match. By contrast, looks and money can be identified immediately, so it doesn't require a long time to get engaged. Desperation is also not a good reason for marriage, and desperation doesn't need a long time to get engaged.
3. Having a deterrent for divorce. Rich people, church-goers, and people with lots of people at their wedding have a lot of people to pressure you to stay together because you lead *public lives*. You don't get a private divorce, you get public embarrassment. Rich people have an additional deterrent in that it's a lot of money to lose if your ex-spouse wants to take you to the cleaners.
1) We dated two times before I proposed.
2) Total time between first date and marriage - 3 months
3) We married in front of a Justice of the Peace, only one witness who I've never seen since and can't remember his name
4) We make way less combined than $125k/year
etc
About the only category we fall into is that neither cares about the other's looks or how much money he/she makes. We'll be celebrating our 23rd anniversary in a couple of weeks.
Like the subject says, sometimes it's nice being an outlier.
This++
It seems contradictory, but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive: you can spend a lot of money on a small wedding, too. So, you can have the overall divorce rate go down as the size of the wedding goes up, while for each grouping of wedding size the divorce rate goes up as more money is spent.
If anybody can figure out how to throw a wedding for 200+ people for under $25K, hosting the guests in a reasonable manner without making my friends / family do all the work . . . please let me know! As far as I can tell your options for a wedding that comes in well under 25K are to go small (food, beverages, and venue rental are the three biggest parts of our budget) or go inexpensive (potluck).
Irresponsible, immature, self-absorbed assholes who have a poor opinion of their spouse get divorced 500x more often than normal, nice, decent, reasonable people. Who would have guessed? At least this dispels the absolutely ridiculous myth that Christians have the same divorce rate as everyone else.
This is completely biased toward Christians or maybe folks who believe in religion. I am an American, but I am an atheist. I am originally from India. As a culture, we do not believe divorce leads to anything good, and so we stay together. We make sometimes more, sometimes less.
I do not believe relations can be quantified with formulas. If that were true, you could start predicting everything in the world. We do the crazy things we do because we are in love. Then we get married and fall out of love. That's it.
There seems to be a contradiction. The more guests you have, the less likely you are to divorce and the more you spend on the wedding the more likely you are to divorce. Usually, the cost is directly proportional to the number of guests, is it not?
Short men tend to get married later but stay married longer. Referenced
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Or maybe other people (relatives) paid for the big wedding? But I read the same thing about couples who have big weddings tending to stay together 30 years ago, so this is VERY old "news". My theory is that these couples just did not want to spend a similar amount for another wedding and figured that they could not count on many gifts from the same people who were invited the first time after that marriage flopped. But none of these studies tell you how HAPPY people are in their marriages, which is the most important thing. Next we may have a wave of same sex divorces which may change this analysis in ways I can't predict.
Not Really. We had around two hundred people at ours. My wife got her dress from a consignment shop and the reception was a luncheon at a large restaurant rather than an all night thing. The wedding party handed out the cake rather than paying the caterer $1.00 a slice to hand them out for us. It was a great way to mingle and the guests seemed to enjoy it.
At some of my friends's weddings, the bride paid more for her dress than we paid for the entire wedding.
The two statements about the more expensive the wedding the greater the chance of divorce and that the larger the ceremony you have the less likely you are to end up divorced seem mutually exclusive to me.
How expensive? Many churches offer an essentially free venue to members. $4/ head for a taco man, get over feeling like you need to get everyone drunk, and all you have left are fixed costs. Our 225-person wedding set us and some family members back in the neighborhood of $8-9k. And we splurged on some things, in our opinion. $4k is not unreasonable.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
This all sounds about as legit as making a list of your 'perfect mate' or using a numerical rating system for the opposite sex. It also smacks very much of someone's personal agenda for society.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
get over feeling like you need to get everyone drunk,
Well I do suppose that without the open bar you'll cut down on the large number of guests who were on the fence about coming in the first place.
According to my wife, its no poles in the right half plane.
No matter how much I beg.
Have gnu, will travel.
For a successful marriage:
"I do"
"Yes Dear"
Too bad basic literacy isn't part of your religion. The original poster specifically called marriage a "Christian tradition."
It certainly is a Christian tradition, but it is clearly not a exclusively Christian tradition. Just like "Honour your father and mother" is clearly a Christian value, it clearly is not a value that is exclusive to Christianity.
Jan
There are lots of things that can't simply be controlled for. Dating for a while before getting engaged and married is a good idea because you really get to know your would-be spouse (gotta make it through the holidays at least once with your potential future in-laws!) but guys who are focused on their partner's appearance and women who focus on their partner's money are more likely to get divorced? Is that a convoluted way of saying "Don't obsess over things about your partner you can't control?"
The quotes in the summary say that couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to get divorced than couples who get married in ceremonies with 200+ people, but they also say that the more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you are to get divorced. How much do they think a 200+ person wedding costs??
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it also reminds me of a quite from Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath: "Experts are pretty bad at predictions. But they are great at assessing base rates."
I'd rather be a happy divorcee than an unhappy husband. That's why church-going folks stay married, because being unhappy fuels their faith on the afterlife, instead of enjoying the now-life. Suckers
The odds of winning the lottery may be sixty million to one against, but some people still do win on occasion.
Agreed. One way to reconcile it would be that a bride that invites lots of guests is more into it the marriage for the approval of her friends. She would see a divorce as a social embarrassment.
I see these numbers and compare them and arrive at this simple conclusion:
Romeo and Juliette were completely borked from the start.
1. Know the person you're going to marry and have them know you.
2. Have a reasonably stable life.
3. ?
4. Profit.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
First off that 30k average for a wedding is based off a survey in a high end bridal magazine. So the people who answered that are exactly the sort who would be in the market to spend 30k on wedding. http://resultzdigital.com/wall...
Second, this church going statistic needs a bit more elaboration. Because atheists and agnostics have the lowest rate of divorce in the U.S. while fundamentalist Christians have the highest. http://www.religioustolerance..... So do they mean to imply that Christians divorce less or is it that lazy Christians divorce more?
Other than that interesting statistics.
I've seen it suggested elsewhere that people who delay marriage and live together for a while first get separated as frequently or perhaps more than people who get married quickly. Which is right? Or is it just that the years spent living together are basically a lower stakes version of the first couple of years of marriage, which are when most divorces happen otherwise?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Duration of dating before marriage would be a good predictor, as would female desire for wealthy spouse (negative) and male desire for pretty spouse (negative), in that duration will allow a couple to get past the "in love" phase to the "love" phase, and looks and wealth fade.
Sunk costs of giant weddings and social pressures account for most of the rest.
The question is, are you happy? What do you define as happy?
My grandparents all got married with an expectation that their spouse was their partner. Marriage used to be more about family and stability than about other stuff.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... and think that generating all these factors will give them a more long-term marriage. People routinely do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, and, more importantly, that causation has a _direction_ that is all-important.
Basically, all the study says is that the more serious you take marriage, the longer it is likely to last. It does not say anything about happiness or achievement of personal goals (unless the number of years is a goal for you).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Does it involve flying piles of pasta and meatballs?
Studies also show that douchebags eventually wind up alone. FOREVER ALONE.
Statisticians Uncover What Makes For a Stable Marriage
Of course correlation is not causation
*cough*
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'd say that an atheist has a belief system that has nothing to do with going to church, but that there may be some sort of comparable action or ritual that might cause a similar effect.
If they maintain that action, they may have a higher chance of staying together. If you separate the religious element from the action of going to church, you still have a regularly scheduled social activity where a number of people are assembled to do some sort of coordinated action. Atheists can certainly have things like that, although it is probably not something as common as going to church.
It also might be that the two studies in question don't correlate well together. There are studies all the time that seem to contradict one another in various details. So... YMMV.
There were several hundred people, and the total cost was likely just a couple thousand.
Well, until the wedding planning team mentioned to the BBQ shop that it was for a wedding, and pork / beef suddenly became scarce resources.
Sadly that doesn't sound too out of place in my family, but replace block party with party at the farm or local VFW.
Why yes my family is a bunch of rednecks but hey we have a good time.
Time to offend someone
I guess we're outliers.......
Expensive weddings can also mean large bank accounts. Large bank accounts can mean expensive alimony. Expensive alimony can mean no desire to get a divorce. No divorce means long marriage (albeit most likely an unhappy one).
Bark less. Wag more.
In my experience, raising a child has been absolutely one of the most difficult challenges I have ever have to face. I would not be suprised if many marriages fall apart after a baby is born. It is an extremily stressful and exhausting experience.
Statistics tell you everything about everyone and yet nothing about anyone.
As for rude relatives, well, you can't choose your relatives, but you can choose whether or not to be around them.
I wish real life relationships were actually that simple. My parents have asked rude questions about marriage time tables, whether we would have kids, etc. Stuff that is none of their business and I find the questions quite rude. Sure I could break them off and say I'm never going to see them again but that seems a little extreme for a well intended but impolite inquiry. There are relatives I generally avoid but I'd need a better reason for my parents, in-laws, grand parents or sibling.
What I don't get is why everyone that has kids automatically assumes every other person wants to have them too. They simply cannot imagine that you wouldn't want the burden of raising another human being. I'm sure it's a lovely experience and all but people get really pushy and intrusive about it.
You obviously don't know some of the people I know. One of my friends from high school got married when it became legal here and is very much the bull dyke (she is also a great lifting partner and is built like an eastern block power lifter), she ended up marrying the lipstick lesbian. Trust me the gender roles exist in that relationship even if the male role is filled by a female. I realize that this is probably outside of the norm for non hetero relationships but what ever works for you.
On a side note was when I was "informed" that my friend was a lesbian. I gave her a call and wanted to know if she was up for going out for some beers (probably once a month we do this) and was asked "if it would be ok to bring her (long pause) partner along?". So we go out and I meet her future wife to be and am informed that she is gay. I responded that it was pretty obvious even going back 15 year when if first met her in middle school on the shot put team and this wasn't a surprise. The next question I had was have you tried a Pyramid Hefe-Wissen.
Time to offend someone
http://xkcd.com/539/
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Infinite Patience
Blowjobs. Lots and lots of blowjobs.
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin
That's a demonstration of how big data analysis may be worthless and misleading. Nowadays we don't talk about neural networks anymore but they mainly produced these kind of idiot results
Second the motion. My wife and I were in the wedding party of a dual wedding - two brothers marrying two sisters - held at a college chapel with the reception being a backyard open house (the mothers were both great cooks), with well over 200 friends, relatives, classmates, and random neighbors. Both couples still married 35+ years later. It's about the sort of people who have a large social circle.
Well, until the wedding planning team mentioned to the BBQ shop that it was for a wedding, and pork / beef suddenly became scarce resources.
There was no "wedding planning team", nor was there a "BBQ shop". They just asked some guests to bring grills, and we took turns cooking. I don't remember the menu, but I do remember that they had veggie burgers for those of us that don't eat meat. They also had plenty of watermelons.
If someone is using 'open bar' as the deciding factor to come to my wedding or not: a) I probably wouldn't have invited them in the first place, and b) they wouldn't be missed at the wedding, nor in my life.
This article falls into the classical fallacy of causation vs correlation. Just because people who have expensive weddings are more likely to divorce doesn't mean that this element has anything to do with the marriage breakup. It might be due to other dominating factors that are correlated with the expensive weddings. Likewise for all of the other factors that were found to be significant. Because this was a completely uncontrolled set of experiments, it is virtually impossible to dig down to the root cause without extensive case studies. Alternatively a comprehensive study of twins who made different life choices would make for useful conclusions. Just applying statistics alone to Big Data will not produce meaningful conclusions.
Unfortunately extensive studies without any significant conclusions don't make very popular reports. I just read a highly-touted publication from Yale discussing the health effects of living near fracking sites in Pennsylvania. The biggest conclusion that I saw from the raw data is that fracking makes people be born six years earlier (hence be six years older). Obviously that is not the result of the drilling! The authors had to reach more plausible conclusions and instead preached that the potential pollution caused nose bleeds. I'm doubtful that they could possibly say that with confidence given the very different nature of people living in the fracking site vicinity. It was a very uncontrolled experiment.
Nevertheless, the researchers had to get to some kind of major finding if they wanted to have the paper published and then obtain additional funding for follow-up investigations. Disclaimer: this is just a discussion of scientific misconduct and not a commentary if I wanted a fracking site in my backyard (which my kids think would be awesome to watch and my wife would hate so much she would divorce me).
You hit this spot-on. Correlation vs causation is enormous. The conclusions from this study will be of no benefit to people wanting a happy marriage.
I read that as if their family agrees to it then it lasts longer. You only spend $30k on a wedding if you're inviting your family. If you elope and have a vegas wedding (try to hide it from the family, inviting only a couple of close friends), then it's cheap, but won't last because your family doesn't approve of it. Meanwhile, money still rules all, if you bankrupt yourself with the wedding it won't last either. It really does show that family matters, if you hide it from your family (or keep them out of your wedding then it's a sign of problems, and you can invite 200 people to a wedding for cheap (hold it in your backyard, pay for almost nothing, the food will be the biggest expense).
Does it involve light gray text on a white background?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We wrote a contract together in order to place our marriage on an equal footing and replace all the hideous misogyny in common law. It wasn't about contemplating divorce, but about making the marriage itself a fairer one. (Neither of us owned any property we wanted to shield.)
I piss off bigots.
Eloped, no spending on wedding, no wedding guests, no church and several other 'problems' but 25+ years and going strong.
He does have some things right and it is always interesting to read things like this but important to understand the difference between correlations and causation as well as how variable reality is.
What is most important is we share values and goals. We have a shared dream and both work hard to walk that path, together.
uh oh. I got married on the beach for $500 with 4 guests and didn't tell any relatives, so that my girlfriend could get on my visa. And we're atheists.
OTOH 2 of the guests were our children, we'd been together for 10 years and we earn more than 125k. And we did go on honeymoon, but we took the kids, so does that count? 39% + 51% + 41% x 12.5 x 2 = ?? Will we get divorced?
I saw the headline and couldn't help but think of that annoying codger from eHarmony and his irritating granddaughter. You know the girl -- the one whose teacher finds it necessary to inform his students about women he's dating and where he finds them. Of course, the teacher's relationship is doomed just because he found his date on some other site. Unfortunately, I saw another eHarmony ad, but at least it was without that annoying little cunt.
thatsracist.gif
Don't count your dinosaurs before they're hatched. It doesn't matter if you stayed married for 54 years, if you divorce, you lose. Just because you might enjoy the mental or physical flogging more than your siblings doesn't in any way imply that you're better than them.
You don't eat meat? I knew there was a reason I couldn't stand most of your posts. Now what is at odds is the fact that you're a conservative "Christian" who loves jerking off his guns and yet you act like a vegan, which is totally liberal. I'm so surprised you haven't killed yourself just out of the sheer incompatibility of your obviously broken mind....
Typical Christian. Your tasty hypocrisy sustains me.
Did you just say that judeo-christian religions cause distorted gender roles? Huh? Funny, I would have thought that the GLBTXYZ groups are the ones that are distorting gender roles. They're the ones that claim that people can be "confused" of their gender. They are the ones that have schools now calling their students "Purple Penguins" instead of "Boys and Girls". Look down, below your belly button, that will tell you what gender you are, no confusion needed.
If you're referring to gender roles as in "women should be barefoot and in the kitchen", then I would have to argue that having a true Christian belief does not fit that mold either. While it is attributed to religion, I would argue it's attributed to other factors. In fact, looking at Biblical scripture, it is clear that women had a part in early Christian teaching as well, and there are several scriptural examples of women leading worship and bible studies in the early church. The 'early church' being the time period around the New Testiment and shortly after Christ's death when Christianity was spreading.
Having known many Christians and seen polls from Christian women, they personally don't think there is a 'distortion' of roles. Women are different from men and each contribute to a marriage their strengths. They willingly take on certain responsibilities, just like men willingly take on certain responsibilities.
I'm posting this AC because you'll take it as a personal attack to everything you stand for and I honestly don't feel like dealing with the fallout. That said, you're part of the problem and not the solution. People with your mindset are the reason we have all of the problems with people not "believing" in science (insert NDT quote here). If whatever study or poll agrees with your already preconceived notions then you'll accept it, but the world be damned if they tell you that you're doing it wrong. You should google "confirmation bias".
My wife and I dated several months before deciding we'd get married (and wound up getting married on the one year anniversary of when we met.) I was an E4 in the Army, and she was a warehouse laborer; not making much money between us. I'm an Atheist and she can't be bothered; we've been to church a total of three times since we've been together, all at other people's functions (Christianings, mostly.) We got married by a German justice of the peace (essentially); the two of us, her mother, my best man, and a translator were present. I had a 4-day pass to get married, and no money, so our honeymoon was staying at her mom's apartment and waiting for everyone to go to bed.
ON the other hand, I didn't marry her for her looks (she's cute, but no beauty queen, but hey, I'm not exactly turning heads here) and she definitely didn't marry me for my money, and we probably spend a total of 500DM including food and booze for the family that came to the apartment to celebrate with us. That was almost 25 years ago.
What statisticians lack; and makes for a good marriage. QED.
Honestly, where do they find these numbers? I don't now a single couple who spent more than $10,000 on their wedding, and I'm a musician who performs at weddings. Most people in this country earn less than $60k/year. I can't imagine "The average" being more than half what the average household income is. If that's really true, then we deserve economic collapse. My own wedding: about $5,000 split evenly between the bride's & groom's families - and that was at a big church, out of state, with a big cake, big gown, 6 rented kilts for groom's men, 200+ guests, and Disney honeymoon. People are ridiculous.
You have to get married before you get divorced. There are couples who live together without getting married. (Or have a stable partnership without living together, etc.) It would be interesting to see how the rate of such couples splitting up compares, with respect to all these factors, given how many of these factors would be correlated with the choice re marriage or just non-married relationships.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I'd say it's patience, patience and patience because men and women have different/distinct priorities in life.
Casteism
I know a couple where the husband wanted to write a software system but could not get the go-ahead from his employer to do it. He then used his honeymoon leave to write the system (sending his wife on honeymoon), wrote the system, resigned and sold the system to his ex employer. They are happily married (20 odd years later).I know a couple where the husband wanted to write a software system but could not get the go-ahead from his employer to do it. He then used his honeymoon leave to write the system (sending his wife on honeymoon), wrote the system, resigned and sold the system to his ex employer. They are happily married (20 odd years later).
In America getting married conveys about 500 individual benefits to the couple.
50% of all marriages end in divorce.
The rest end in death.
For a female, find a reliable guy, who is not rich, not handsome, do not know how to speak sugared words. For me, find a hunsband who are quite interested in mineral machinery and do not have much interests on social contact with female, that is a quite stalbe marriage. www.vertical-mill.net, that is our machinery website.