By Scott M. Stanley & Galena K. Rhoades
In most areas of life, having more experience is good. Want
to be great in your chosen field? Sustained experience is essential. Want to be
great at a sport? There’s no substitute for practice. And anyone who runs a
business can tell you that their best employees are those who have been in the
job long enough to have learned how to handle the normal well and the
unexpected with wisdom.
While more experience is often beneficial in life, the story
looks different when it comes to some types of experience before marriage. For
example, in our Before “I Do” report, we surveyed a national
longitudinal sample of young adults about their love lives prior to marriage to
examine factors associated with future marital quality. We found that having
more sexual and cohabiting partners before marriage is associated with lower relationship
quality once married. In particular, having only ever lived with or had sex
with one’s spouse was associated with higher marital quality. Our findings are
consistent with other studies showing that cohabiting with more partners before
marriage is associated with greater likelihood of divorce[i]
and that a higher number of sexual partners before marriage is associated with
lower marital quality and greater likelihood of divorce.[ii]
As we noted, what happens in Vegas may not always stay in Vegas. But why?
There are many reasons why having more romantic partners
before marriage will be associated with higher risk of difficulties in marriage. One of
the most important explanations comes under the heading of what some call selection
effects. For many people, an elevated risk of difficulties in marriage was present
before they had their first relationship experience. Background characteristics
such as parental divorce, low education, and economic disadvantage are associated
both with having more sexual and cohabiting partners and also with lower
marital quality and/or divorce.[iii]
So it may not be that having more sexual or cohabiting partners causes further
risk because a lot of risk was already in motion. Selection is a big part of
how relationships unfold, but is it the whole story? We believe that, in
addition to selection, behavior matters and has plausible connections to
marital outcomes. We are going to explain four reasons why having more relationship
experience before tying the knot might make it harder to succeed in marriage.
More Awareness of
Alternatives
What could be wrong with having a lot of alternative
romantic partners and knowing it? Maybe just this: Part of the essence of
commitment is “making a choice to give up other choices.”[iv]
Of course, committing to a choice does not make the alternatives disappear. That
would be too easy. Part of the work of commitment in marriage is letting other
options go and investing your energy in the one person you have chosen.[v]
Alternatives compete with commitment.[vi]
When a person has had many serious relationships prior to
marriage, it may increase awareness of how many alternatives actually exist.
Furthermore, in a world where people can conveniently monitor their ex-partners
online, it is easy for an old flame to resurface.
Still, it seems reasonable to believe that, up to a point, learning
about various partners and choosing the best one should make marriages better. Sociologists have long noted
that there should be some ideal amount of searching that will result in optimal
outcomes in marriage. Norval Glenn and his colleagues nicely described this
theory in a 2010 article:
According to another view, which we
call the length of search thesis, the longer a person searches for a mate and “circulates”
on the marriage market (at least to a certain point), the greater is the
probability of a good marital match when he/she marries.[vii]
We are not arguing against an adequate search process. We
are suggesting that having a lot of partners—and sharing serious relationship
experiences with them like sex and cohabiting—can have the downside of raising
awareness of alternatives in a way that makes it harder to foreclose them to
make a marriage work. Also, realize that you can learn a lot about another
person without going so deep that you lose options for your future.
Changed Expectations:
The Perfect Sexual Lover (in Your Mind)
Think about two different people: person Q and person M (not
a Bond movie). For our thought experiment, imagine that these two people are
nearly identical as to all sorts of factors related to success in marriage.
That is to say, selection is not involved in what we are describing. But Q and
M have one difference. Through the cosmic fate of where each lives and the
people around them, Q ended up having 10 sexual partners before marriage, while
M has only ever had sex with the person he/she married (whether M and his/her
spouse waited until marriage does not affect our argument).
Q and M have been married to their respective mates for five
years, now, and life has gotten harder, with children, work, and debt. For both
couples, the sexual relationship has lost some edge. That’s no shock and not unusual.
But in the midst of this phase of life, Q and M have that one difference that
leads to Q being quite a bit less happy than M.
Q has vivid memories of 10 sexual partners. M does not. Once
the comparisons begin—and this happens more when we’re a bit unhappy—we’re not
all that fair in how we make them. Q remembers how great sex was with three of
the 10 partners: exciting, pleasing, and thrilling. In fact, Q remembers
specific, different, and pleasing memories with each of those three. In
assessing sexual satisfaction five years into marriage, Q merges those three prior
partners into one object who is, of course, not a real person. It’s a hybrid,
perfect sexual lover. Satisfaction in all areas of life is partly a function of
what we get compared to what we expected. Q expects a lot based on all that
experience, easily forgetting that none of those three relationships had what
it takes to go the distance. That doesn’t matter. That’s the comparison that
feeds unhappiness in marriage, now.
If life presented you with such a simple choice, would you rather
be trying to make your marriage work with Q’s history or M’s? We cannot assume
what choice you would make, but we
think our point is pretty clear.
More Experience
Breaking It Off
Cohabitation has characteristics that seem paradoxical. Living
with a partner makes it harder to break up than dating, all other things being
equal, and often now comes at a time in relationship development where people have
not really chosen each other for the future.[viii]
And yet, cohabiting couples frequently break up, and they are more likely than any
other time in history not to end up marrying.[ix]
These days, cohabitation has become more a part of the
dating scene than a lead-up to marriage. Let’s call the phenomenon cohabidating. In this context, some people
are getting a lot of experience at leaving serious relationships (or surviving
being left). Just as with our prior point, that does not sound bad in one
way—at least insofar as people are breaking off relationships that had no
future. But it’s also true that people tend to get good at things they have a
lot of experience doing. People can get good at moving out and moving on.
How does that impact marriage? Some people probably so
deeply learn that they can survive leaving a relationship when they are unhappy
with it that they leave reasonably good marriages that would have given them
and their children the best outcomes in life. They bail too quickly.
Obviously, many others leave very poor or even dangerous marriages
only after a lot of agonizing and effort. We’re not suggesting divorce is ever
easy or that it is not sometimes the best course. But in a day and age when
people get so much experience moving out and moving on, we think many may learn
to do so too rapidly, and to their detriment.
Babies
Sex has something to do with babies. Increasingly,
cohabitation does also,[x]
and a lot of couples have children even if they’re not very committed to one
another.[xi]
Having children from prior partners before settling down in marriage is associated
with more challenges in finding a mate and making the relationship work, just
as having children from one marriage has always made it harder to remarry
successfully following divorce or a spouse’s death.[xii]
Even having a child with your eventual spouse before you’ve fully decided to
share your future is associated with more difficulties.
Societal shifts toward having more sexual and/or cohabiting
partners before marriage means a lot more relationship experience, but when
children are involved, it also means more people have constraints on whom they
can attract, their economic options, and what traits a potential spouse must
have. This is especially true for women, since they are more likely to invest a
great deal of time in the care of their children. It may be crass to say, but there
is a market for mate selection, and those who have a family already in tow have
fewer options when trying to find the best partner for the future. Hence, this
is one more way that having more relationship experience before marriage can
impact the odds of having a happy and lasting marriage.
Hope
Nothing we raised here dooms anyone to a life of being
unloved. We are talking about relationship experiences that may impact one’s odds
of achieving the common goal of a lifelong marriage. If you are single and aspire
to find long-lasting love in marriage, don’t give up, even if you spent some
serious time in Vegas. Just stop gambling, now. If you want to change the
trajectory of your life, do two things: First, slow down your relationships.[xiii]
There is a lot of evidence that this can help improve one’s odds of lasting
love. Second, start making decisions; don’t let things slide when the choice
before you could impact your future options for happiness in marriage.
[i] Lichter,
D. T., Turner, R. N., Sassler, S. (2010). National
estimates of the rise in serial cohabitation. Social Science Research, 39, 754-765; Teachman, J. D. (2003). Premarital
sex, premarital cohabitation, and the risk of subsequent marital dissolution
among women. Journal of Marriage and
Family, 65(2), 444-455.
[ii] Busby,
D. M., Willoughby, B. J., and Carroll, J. S. (2013). Sowing
wild oats: Valuable experience or a field full of weeds? Personal Relationships, 20(4), 706-718; Olenick,
I. (2000). Odds
of spousal infidelity are influenced by social and demographic factors. Family Planning Perspectives, 32(3), 148-149.
[v]
See, e.g., Rusbult, C. E., and Buunk, B. P. (1993) Commitment
processes in close relationships: An interdependence analysis. Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships, 10, 175-204.
[vi] Thibaut,
J. W., and Kelley, H. H. (1959). The
social psychology of groups. New York: Wiley. See also Stanley, S. M., and Markman, H. J. (1992). Assessing
commitment in personal relationships. Journal
of Marriage and the Family, 54, 595-608.
[vii] Citing
Becker (1981), Levinger (1965), and South (1995): Glenn, N. D., Uecker, J. E., and Love, R. W. B. Jr. (2010). Later first
marriage and marital success. Social
Science Research, 39, 787-800.
[viii]
For more, see prior blog articles here
and here.
See also Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., and Markman, H. J. (2012). The impact of the
transition to cohabitation on relationship functioning: Cross-sectional and
longitudinal findings. Journal of
Family Psychology, 26(3), 348 - 358.
[ix] Vespa,
J. (2014). Historical
trends in the marital intentions of one-time and serial cohabitors. Journal
of Marriage and Family, 76, 207-217; Guzzo, K. B. (2014). Trends in
cohabitation outcomes: Compositional changes and engagement among never-married
young adults. Journal of Marriage and
Family, 76, 826-842.
[xi]
See Marriage
and positive child outcomes: commitment, signaling, and sequence. A
thorough review of societal trends can be had in Sawhill, I. V. (2014). Generation unbound: Drifting into sex and
parenthood without marriage. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution
Press.
[xii]
One excellent review of the complexity that children from prior relationships
represent for the lives of their parents is the following: Guzzo, K. B. (2014).
New
partners, more kids: Multiple-partner fertility in the United States. The ANNALS of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 654, 66-86.
doi:10.1177/0002716214525571
[xiii]
For an excellent article that suggests going slower has benefits, see Sassler,
S., Addo, F. R., and Lichter, D. T. (2012). The
tempo of sexual activity and later relationship quality. Journal
of Marriage and Family, 74, 708-725.
