American Community Survey Data on Marriage and Divorce - U.S. Census Bureau
Historical Marriage Trends from 1890-2010: A Focus on Race Differences. by Diana B. Elliott, Kristy Krivickas, Matthew W. Brault, and Rose M. Kreider. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, San Francisco, CA, May 3-5, 2012.
Vicki Larson: Does Porn Watching Lead to Divorce?
If you read many of the online advice boards, it seems that a lot of women are fed up with their partner's porn watching and wonder if they should get a divorce. According to research by Patrick F. Fagan, senior fellow and director of the conservative Center for Research on Marriage and Religion, pornography is a "quiet family killer." Not only does watching porn contribute to infidelity, but a spouse's porn obsession was a factor in 56 percent of divorces, Fagan says.
About 60 percent of all marriages that eventually end in divorce do so within the first 10 years, researchers say. If that continues to hold true, the divorce rate for college graduates who married between 1990 and 1994 would end up at only about 25 percent, compared to well over 50 percent for those without a four-year college degree.
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Her.meneutics: Hookup Culture: Mostly a Myth
Yes, this is true; women do say this, and my research supports it. But there is another side to the story that we don’t hear often enough. It’s something many college men say when safely behind closed doors, about how they like hookup culture about as much as the women do — which is to say, they don’t like it one bit. They just feel pressured to say they do in public. While it’s socially acceptable for women to admit that hooking up is not for them, it’s generally considered social suicide for a man to say the same thing.
In several lab experiments, undergraduate students completed the new computer-based word-association task assessing how much they associate physical attractiveness with an ideal partner. As words flashed on the screen, the participants had to pick those they associated with positive feelings. Depending on how strongly the participant felt about physical attractiveness, words associated with sexiness that popped up during an "I like" trial were selected quicker.
The researchers then compared these results with participants' responses to direct questions about important characteristics in a partner. The two responses differed: No matter if students thought they really needed a hot partner or not, they ended up responding the same to the word test.
The unconscious word test matched with what the students were actually interested in when they met a real-life person in speed-dating scenarios.
WASHINGTON — Less materialistic spouses are more likely to find themselves in happier marriages than those who dwell too much on money and possessions, a trio of US researchers say.
In findings published Thursday, the team led by Jason Carroll at Brigham Young University in Utah explored the impact that value differences about materialism could have on a marriage.
Previous studies limited themselves only to materialism in itself, and not the importance that husbands and wives placed on material things.
From data collected from 1,734 couples, they concluded that, even among spouses who shared the same materialistic values, "materialism had a negative association with marital quality."
Modern-Marriage Report: Not as Necessary Yet Still Desired - TIME
But cohabitation among the economically blessed is a whole different ball game than it is among the struggling. For most college-educated couples, living together is like a warm-up run before the marital marathon. They work out a few of the kinks and do a bit of house-training and eventually get married and have kids. Those without a college degree, says Cherlin, tend to do it the other way around — move in together, have kids and then aim for the altar. And children, as Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston discovered, change everything.
Modern-Marriage Report: Not as Necessary Yet Still Desired - TIME
Promising publicly to be someone's partner for life used to be something people did to lay the foundation of their independent life. It was the demarcation of adulthood. Now it's more of a finishing touch, the last brick in the edifice, sociologists believe. "Marriage is the capstone for both the college-educated and the less well educated," says Johns Hopkins' Cherlin. "The college-educated wait until they're finished with their education and their careers are launched. The less educated wait until they feel comfortable financially."
Likewise, about six-in-ten (63%) Millennials think that single motherhood is bad for society, compared with seven-in-ten (71%) adults ages 30 and older. More than four-in-ten (44%) Millennials say that the institution of marriage is becoming obsolete, compared with 37% of those ages 30 and older.
Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.
Report: Men Unfaithful to Women Who Earn More - TIME
The study, which was presented by Christin Munsch, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, examined 18 to 28 year olds who were living together or married more than a year. (The cohort, it turns out, most likely to be outearning men.) It found that men who were completely dependent on their wives' incomes were five times likelier to cheat than those who contributed the same amount to the household finances. (See a story on cheating 2.0: apps that are making adultery easier.)
Munsch believes this is not actually about money, but about men's feelings of sexual identity. "Any identity that's important to you, if you feel it's threatened, you're going to engage in behavior that will reinstate your place in that group," she says. "Being a man is strongly identified with being a breadwinner." Men might engage in "hypermasculine activities" — displaying their sexual virility or sexual competence — as a form of compensatory behavior.
The study, which was presented by Christin Munsch, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, examined 18 to 28 year olds who were living together or married more than a year. (The cohort, it turns out, most likely to be outearning men.) It found that men who were completely dependent on their wives' incomes were five times likelier to cheat than those who contributed the same amount to the household finances.
Asia's private international-marriage agencies typically take men to meet their prospective brides on a seven- to 10-day trip in the bride's country of origin, according to a report by Danièle Bélanger, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario in the Population & Societies journal. Some marriage agencies, however, advertise three-day itineraries that have men finding their wife on the day they arrive. The women are presented to the men, and the process of choosing a wife often takes less than an hour. In many cases, the woman can decline a proposal, but Bruce says it's normal for these women to be held captive until they consent, giving them little real choice but to accept. The whole trip, which includes a full wedding, costs the groom between $5,000 and $10,000, while the local Vietnamese brokers that recruit the brides have started charging women between $1,000 and $3,000 to be matched with a prospective husband.
Mothers still do most of the housework, spending 27 percent of their time on it, on average, compared with 18 percent for fathers and 3 percent for children (giving an allowance made no difference).
Couples were given relationship tests before and after the experiment. Those who had taken part in the challenging activity posted greater increases in love and relationship satisfaction than those who had not experienced victory together.
