Tag Archives: Research

Why Dating Is Important For Marriage

Date nights improve marriages, according to common sense and a comprehensive, quantitative study conducted by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. The study showed improvements for married couples who go on frequent dates across categories such as happiness, commitment, communication, parenthood stability, and community integration. The evidence also showed that married couples who devote time together at least once a week not only have lower divorce rates, but also increase the perceived quality of their marriage. That is enough evidence to start dating your spouse more!

In an article about the study, W. Bradford Wilcox and Jeffrey Dew highlight five reasons why date nights have strong correlations to healthy marriages: date nights provide opportunities for communication, novelty, eros, strengthening commitment, and de-stressing.

Communication: The importance of good communication is obvious. We have all experienced the consequences of poor communication with our spouse. Often times, it leads to unnecessary arguments or awkward tension. Poor communication will almost always lead to mismanaged expectations, which in turn lead to disappointment. These negative feelings will slowly pull you apart. Dating throughout marriage will combat these kinds of miscues.

Novelty: Date nights help create new experiences in relationships that have fallen into the mundane ruts that we naturally gravitate to as creatures of habit. If you find yourself stuck in the same routine every day, a date night can be something you will look forward to all week. If you plan a creative date, you will also create fun memories together that you can cherish later on. Either way, date nights will make your future, and your past, better.

Eros: The “spark” and novelty of date nights contribute to the eros – romantic love – aspect of relationships and can make you feel like you’ve just started dating each other all over again. Who doesn’t want to feel those butterflies you felt when you first started dating? Planning consistent dates with your husband or wife will help you fall in love with each other all over again week after week.

Commitment: By opening up to each other on dates, spouses build strong bonds that solidify their commitment to each other. This is important for the inevitable hard times that hit us all. When either of you are at your low point, will you have each other to pull you back up? How strong is your emotional bond with each other? If it needs some improvement, then odds are you aren’t dating each other enough.

De-stressing: Lastly, who doesn’t need stress relief every once in a while? Date nights are fun! Your spouse isn’t just there for you for the tough times, but for enjoyable times too. Relax together. Enjoy each other. Make memories together during well thought-out date nights. You will never regret the time you put in planning a creative date instead of watching the next episode of a show you watch too much.

Sadly, the business of life often gets in the way of planning intentional dates with your spouse. Date night ends up being dinner and a movie every time. These dates aren’t bad, but they can become stale if they are the only form of date night you have together. The repetitive structure does not always foster opportunities to open up to one another during the date.

My wife Michelle and I created Date to Door as a way to help strengthen marriages by planning creative dates and sending spouses all of the ingredients they need for the date in one box. For example, one month’s box included a red candle, empty pill bottles, canvases, paint, brushes, blank coupons, and eight tube socks. Date instructions were sent to tie all of those things together for a creative date night.

Our goal is to help marriages stay strong and grow together.

If you’d like to read more about the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, you can check it out here. If you’d like more information on Date to Door, you can check us out here.

About the author

Gerald Zingraf met his wife Michelle at Virginia Tech within a Christian organization called Cru. They got married a couple of years after college and moved to the Washington, D.C. metro area to start their new lives together. The couple enjoys traveling to strange places, trying new foods, and escaping to the great outdoors. They’re always looking forward to their next big date!

Date to Door was created to make relationships and marriages better. The dates are created specifically to engage you with your spouse while creating memories that you could enjoy looking back on.

7 Signs of a Functional Relationship

During my year studying Interpersonal Communications, I was introduced to the work of one of the top researchers in marriage and relationship health, Dr. John M. Gottman. Throughout my post college years, I have kept up with his research. He is most famous for developing a formula that accurately predicts divorce after observing a couple interact with one another for only five minutes!

Here I will describe Dr. John Gottman’s findings through his research on successful, happy couples, as written in his book, The Science of Trust.

1. Matches in Conflict Style

Most people fall into one of three conflict styles: validators, avoiders, and volatiles. If the ratio of positivity to negativity in conflicts was 5:1, the relationships were functional. However, mismatches in conflict style will increase risk of divorce. The mismatches usually mean one person wants the other to change, but that person is avoiding change. The researchers did not find any volatiles and avoiders matched. They speculate it’s because they don’t get past the courtship phase!

2. Dialogue With Perpetual Issues

Gottman discovered that only 31% of couples’ disagreements were resolvable! This means the majority of conflicts were about perpetual problems, which was attributed to personality differences (even among similar temperaments). While active listening seems like a good idea in theory, it almost never is practiced or works in real life settings, because if there is any negativity at all, the listener finds that hard to ignore and will usually react to it.

One of the biggest indicators for a successful relationship is having a “soft” start-up. This usually puts the pressure on women, since we are the ones who bring up issues in the relationship 80% of the time. The positive responses in these conflicts were from couples in relationships who used the gentler start-up. So remember to keep your sense of humor, and be sensitive to your beloved! Dialogue is necessary to avoid “gridlock” in conflicts, and remember, God created us uniquely, so rejoice in that!

3. Present Issues as Situational Joint Problems

Instead of blaming your spouse for your feelings of irritability and disappointment in the relationship, express how you feel, but then identify your needs. Be gentle in this conversation. Focus on what he or she is doing right, and acknowledge that first. Remember, you’re not perfect either, so don’t expect gratitude for your complaints.

4. Successful Repair Attempts

No one is perfect. After years of spending time with someone, you’re going to get on their nerves from time to time, and vice versa. This is actually a good thing! It helps us identify our areas of weakness beyond the shadow of a doubt, and remain humble through seeking correction.

Your goal in a relationship is not to avoid these conflict situations, or punish yourself when they happen, but rather process the damage done and make repair. This point of repair is so crucial. Saying sorry alone is never enough. Work with your spouse in identifying those areas where you strayed, apologize for those specifics, and ask what you can do to make it up to them.

I teach my daughters that for every offense they commit to one another, they must actively seek three to five good things to do in reparation for them. Repairs also help maintain the positive balance in the relationship.

5. Remaining Physiologically Calm During Conflict

Once adrenaline is flooding our bodies, we are rendered incapable of empathetic conversation. Learn techniques and skills to self-soothe. When you sense your temper rising, either take a break, or interject with some humor. Reach out to hold each other’s hands. Stop the negativity in its tracks. These skills will not only help you in your marriage, but they will help you as a parent when you teach your children positive methods of self-soothing.

6. Accept Influence From Your Spouse

Resist the pattern of turning down every request your husband and wife makes. Accepting influence means looking at your beloved’s point of view, and allowing their way, as long as it’s not immoral. This means stretching your comfort zone. So if your significant other asks for you to wake up early on a Saturday morning to pray in front of abortion clinic, for example, try it, instead of making excuses or backing down.

7. Building Friendship, Intimacy, and Positivity Affects Systems

This is where couples who practice Natural Family Planning have an advantage. There is already that regular built-in daily evaluation of how you’re going to spend your time together, and how you will show your love for one another. The issue isn’t whether you do love each other, but rather which way are you going to express it today? This just means keeping up the courtship all throughout marriage. Learn to love each other well. Keep a greater ratio of positivity to negativity. Start those habits now, and you’ll have a seamless transition into marriage.

My husband, Alex and I can attribute much of our success in marriage to prayer, regularly receiving the sacraments, and following these points in our relationship. After reading these points, maybe you’ll find an area that needs improvement in your own relationship. If you recognize these habits in your own relationship, congrats! Keep up the good work; you’re on the road to happily ever after.

Article originally published by CatholicMatch Institute, which provides resources to help single Catholics develop a strong foundation for marriage through advocacy, programs, and scholarships. Used with permission.

Making “I Do” Work

I love weddings! It’s a good thing because we’re going to a lot of them lately! It never gets old for me…that courageous and touching moment when the beaming couple faces each other and says “for better or worse, for rich or for poorer, in sickness and in health until death…”

Of course, they haven’t got a clue about what that means. Few of us, standing there lighting up the church with smiles on our wedding day, really understood what that promise meant. The promise to “love and honor” one another slowly unfolds over time as we learn to adjust to the fact that our spouse talks excessively in the mornings and we prefer quiet, or that he/she consistently leaves the cap off the toothpaste.

Observers of this annual flurry of summer weddings sometimes ask themselves: “Who in their right mind would ever make a promise like that?” “Why marry?” The not-very-serious response is that you are not in your right mind when you decide to marry…you’re in love and the first stage of love is blind, though sight returns swiftly in the first couple of years.

The more serious response from the Christian perspective is that we believe people choose marriage because God calls them to it. We regard marriage as a vocation, a call to holiness not unlike the call to priesthood or consecrated or single life. Every baptized person is called to be “holy,” to become an image of God and ultimately to reach heaven through whatever pathway they choose whether it be marriage, religious life, ordination or the single life.

Marriage is one way God chooses to continue our development into more patient, loving, self-sacrificing and life-giving people. Marriage is a life laboratory in which we discover the real meaning of faithfulness, belonging, forgiveness and unconditional love. If you have kids, you know that they speed up the learning curve on all these things.

At a recent conference on marriage, I discovered that marriage therapists and academicians who have thoroughly researched marriage have concluded that marriage is also good for you personally, not to mention its many benefits for children. In their book The Case for Marriage based on authoritative research, Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher argue that being married is actually better for you physically, materially, and spiritually than being single or divorced. Married people live longer, have better health, earn more money, feel more fulfilled in their lives than people who remain single, cohabit, or get divorced. The book outlines numerous other advantages of marriage both to individuals and to society.

Celebrating wedding days takes on a deeper meaning when one realizes that a couple’s success in married life has vast repercussions not just on them but on all of church and society. In addition to giving gifts and throwing showers, we might all benefit from a more intentional effort to continue our support for married couples long after the wedding. How to do that? Here’s a list to get you started:

Remember to celebrate anniversaries, your own and other couples.
Read a good book or watch a video program on marriage and share it with another couple.
Take your own marriage in for an annual checkup…like attending a retreat or workshop to improve communication skills
Support married friends during their difficult times.
Trade baby-sitting (or dog-sitting for empty-nesters) so couple friends can get away alone together now and then.

Pray with your spouse, and ask for God’s help. Recent research shows that shared religious practices are predictors of marital stability.

Do Children Really Make a Marriage Less Happy?

In Church teaching, children are called the “Crown” of marriage, but those same documents also call children the “Cross” of marriage. Experienced parents can testify that children brought happiness and satisfaction to their lives, but they know it is not easy to raise a family. Research confirms that marital happiness suffers when children arrive. Think about those early years, and you would know what they theologians and scientists are talking about.

New studies indicate that the “happiness gap” is relatively small. Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, believes that the pros outweigh the cons. He cites the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, which says that, while every additional child makes parents just 1.3 percentage points less likely to be “very happy,” the estimated happiness boost of marriage is about 18 percentage points.

“A closer look at the General Social Survey also reveals that child No. 1 does almost all the damage. Otherwise identical people with one child instead of none are 5.6 percentage points less likely to be very happy. Beyond that, additional children are almost a happiness free lunch. Each child after the first reduces your probability of being very happy by a mere 0.6 percentage points,” Caplain says. He cites decades’ worth of twin and adoption research to point out that children are shaped by more factors than how attentive their parents are.

Since he is an economist, Caplan expresses himself in how much capital parents expend in childrearing: “If you think that your kids’ future rests in your hands, you’ll probably make many painful ‘investments’ –and feel guilty that you didn’t do more. Once you realize that your kids’ future largely rests in their own hands, you can give yourself a guilt-free break.” Caplain will publish a book in 2011, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

In the parenting years, spouses will find that patience and time together are rare commodities. Although the additional demands of parenting can draw a couple closer together in their joint project, this seldom happens automatically. In their book Marrying Well, Catholic marriage experts James and Evelyn Whitehead suggest ways to moderate the strain of parenting: “We can talk things out more often, we can reexamine the way we use our time and money and energy, we can try to be clearer about our real priorities as a family, we can change some of the patterns that do not work very well.”

Parenting is hard work, but spouses are not destined to decline into unsatisfying relationships when children are in the picture. They can choose how they will respond to the challenge. In the process, each person can gain maturity and each can grow in appreciation of the other’s developing abilities. As James and Evelyn Whitehead, say “Being parents together can call out in each of us qualities of generosity and inventiveness that make us even more loveable to one another. I learn there is a playfulness in you that I have not seen so well before; you come to cherish the breadth of my care. Our commitment to each other is strengthened as our lives are woven together in patterns of concern and joy and responsibility for our children.”

Take heart! In time, your “crown” will rest easier on your brow. It helps to recognize that parenting years are one season in the life of a marriage. Children eventually grow up and leave home. Studies also show that the “empty nest” is associated with significant improvement in marital happiness for all parents. God is merciful!

Reprinted with permission. ACT Newsletter, Christian Family Movement-USA, 2010.

The Truth About Divorce Statistics

“The truth about marriage is that divorce is getting less common,” New York Times writer Tara Parker-Pope says in her newly released book, “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage” (Dutton, 2010). For a variety of reasons, “divorce rates have dropped sharply since peaking in the late 1970s,” she observes.

Parker-Pope frequently reports on current marriage research in the Times. Her book says that in recent years she has “interviewed dozens of the world’s top marriage and relationship researchers, and pored over hundreds of published research studies,” exploring “what science has taught us about lasting relationships and the complexities of courtship, love and marriage.”

Inflated divorce statistics can be harmful, Parker-Pope suggests. She is concerned that misleading statistics have “trained a generation to be ambivalent about marriage and divorce.” People are left asking, “If half of all married couples are getting divorced, what’s the big deal?”

Parker-Pope cautions that incorrectly understanding current divorce statistics may result in many people believing that “marriage is more fragile than it really is.” Believing that more people are destined to divorce than is the case could lead some couples simply to give up when problems occur in their marriages, she fears.

The “grim statistic” that 50 percent of marriages are destined to end in divorce has been repeated for years, “but that bleak prognosis doesn’t apply to most couples getting married today or even most of those who married in the last few decades,” according to Parker-Pope. The problem, she adds, lies at least partly in how divorce rates tend to be calculated.

Her book holds that “because so many variables in the marriage-and-divorce equation are changing, a simple calculation comparing marriages and divorces in a given year ends up distorting the result and suggesting that the divorce rate is higher than it really is.”

One factor in the overall divorce-rate picture is that couples today tend to marry at an older age than was the case in 1970, for example. Studies indicate that the “risk for divorce drops significantly when couples wait to wed until after the age of twenty-five,” Parker-Pope writes. She says an added benefit of marrying at a later age may be that “many of the weakest relationships are ending before a couple ever heads to the altar.”

It is true that couples married in the 1970s divorce at high rates, according to Parker-Pope. Then couples typically married “in their late teens and early twenties,” she states; statistics show that the 30-year divorce rate among these couples “is about 47 percent.”

But Parker-Pope finds that “people married in the 1980s and 1990s are getting divorced at lower rates than their counterparts married in the 1970s.” In fact, she says it appears that marital stability is “improving each decade.”

So, for Parker-Pope, today “the good news” is that “far more people are succeeding at marriage than failing.” She says research suggests that “far more than half of married couples today stay married.”

Nonetheless, she points out that “a sizable minority of marriages will eventually fail.” She notes, as well, that fewer people today marry at all.

The writer cautions that current statistics on divorce do not mean that marriage has become easy. Actually, Parker-Pope finds that contemporary couples “have far higher expectations of marriage than did earlier generations.” Social shifts have “raised the bar” for marriage in terms of the emotional fulfillment that is sought, the partnership and fairness that is desired, and the strong sense many spouses have that they ought to remain soul mates.

Looking for Long-Term Dividends? Try Marriage

One of the oldest axioms of married life is that two can live more cheaply than one. That may sound like stretching a point, but the facts at least support the notion that, for a variety of reasons, a married couple can stretch a dollar bill a lot farther than two people living on their own. Perhaps the axiom should be: two can live more cheaply as one.

The fact that two can live more cheaply as one is not only a good reason for so many mergers at the altar, but for so many mergers in the business world. Hard-nosed business people know that there are a lot of cost savings to be had in merging with similar businesses.

The same is true of marriage. And living in one residence rather than two is just one of the reasons. People who are married tend to save more, and they are more cautious in their spending (a young husband is a lot less likely to blow the family income on a fancy sports car if he has a budget-minded wife looking over his shoulder).

Married couples enjoy another economic benefit: specialization. When you’re married, you don’t have to “do it all.” People in marriage can specialize in doing what they do best, and let their spouses do the rest – assuming, of course, that the chores are divided fairly. And when one gets sick, the other is there to pick up the slack.

The term “economy” derives from the Greek word for household management. The toil and drudgery of managing the home itself has been relieved somewhat by modern machinery, but the need for skill in raising children, educating them, and preparing them for the challenge of having families of their own is just as compelling as it has been at any time in history. In fact, with the temptations facing children outside the home today, the need for skill in household management is perhaps greater than ever.

Family life helps the economy

Family life is good for the economy, not to mention for society. Despite the growth of big business firms, the family is still a great training ground for the kind of virtues that lead to successful careers. Family life teaches perseverance, cooperation, the ability to get along with others, and respect for authority – all virtues that are valued highly in any workplace.

Business people are gradually learning the importance of good family backgrounds. Graduate business schools try to teach ethics to their students, but have found that unless their students have developed a deep, internalized sense of ethics while growing up, they are unlikely to profit from an academic presentation of the subject.

In other words, ethical leaders are home-grown, and the values they take with them into the institutions of life are learned mostly by the advice and example of their parents and brothers and sisters.

Married men earn more

Married men are not only more ethical businessmen, they also earn more. According to The Case for Marriage, a book published in 2000, “husbands earn at least 10 percent more than single men do and perhaps as high as 40 percent more.” The authors, Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, cite another study which found that married men, age 55 to 64, earned 20 to 32 percent more than their non-married counterparts.

The earnings gap certainly seems understandable. Married men, even those whose wives work, have dependents to support, so they are more apt to search for jobs that pay well. The pay differential works both ways. Not only do men who need to make more search for jobs that pay more, but companies search for men whose need to earn more makes them more likely to stick to their jobs.

Single men have more freedom to jump from job to job in a search for the perfect career that will satisfy their need for greater meaning in their work. Married men, often the main breadwinners, find that supporting their families lends meaning to their work, and for that reason, are the more stable employees.

David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, sees the same factors at work for men and women. As he put it in an interview with USAToday, married people “work harder, they advance further in their job, they save more money, and maybe invest more wisely. That’s because, one can speculate, they are now working for something larger than themselves. They are working for a family.”

The value of a durable marriage is seen even more clearly by those who split apart. Jay Zagorsky, a Ohio State University researcher, found that couples who divorce give up more than what one might expect to be half of everything they own: they actually lose roughly 75 percent of their personal net worth. The same results were found in a 2006 report by the Rutgers project: a 73 percent drop in wealth for those who divorced and didn’t remarry – and a 75 percent drop in wealth for those who never married.

Marriage is a long-term commitment. For those who are willing to make the commitment, and stick with it, marriage is an institution that will yield long-term dividends.

What Kind of Support Do Spouses Need From Each Other?

After two people marry, they are likely to seek a type of support from each other that they did not seek to the same degree before marrying, according to Daniel Molden, assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Molden is finding through his research that married couples place a high premium on their partners’ support of whatever they determine to be necessary obligations. Married people need their spouse’s support for fulfilling their responsibilities and meeting their commitments.

Before people marry, they tend to focus much more on supporting each other in goals that are future oriented than on goals related to the security and maintenance of their life together, Molden’s research suggests. But engaged couples may not suspect how strongly they will need each other’s support after they marry not only for reaching goals, but for maintaining the security of their life together.

“People planning to get married should think about not only how their partners support what they hope to achieve but also about how their partners support what they feel obligated to accomplish,” said Molden. He added, “We could end up with both happier marriages and more satisfied people in general.”

Prior to marrying, people turn to each other for support in the emotional ups and downs of life and during times of stress. They also want each other’s support for reaching long-term goals and achieving their dreams. Molden’s work indicates that married people still seek that kind of support from each other but that their well-being demands another kind of support as well.

Molden believes couples planning to wed would do well to discuss the need they will have as a married couple for this type of support, perhaps in a marriage-preparation program.

Many couples “don’t spontaneously think about whether their partner supports their fulfillment of responsibilities and obligations when deciding to marry. So I do think that it is something that perhaps should be more of a focus in premarital counseling,” Molden told this Web site.

For example, Molden said, if two people were asked individually “to describe what they felt their primary responsibilities were — both inside and outside of the relationship — and then whether they feel their partner supports them in accomplishing those responsibilities, this would provide an idea of whether that type of support is there. If it were lacking, couples could be encouraged to think about what their partner could do to improve support in this area.”

Before marrying, “couples could be encouraged to think about whether their partner is someone who will not only be on board with the long-term hopes and aspirations they have set for themselves, but who will also appreciate and assist in the more immediate responsibilities they believe they must manage from day to day,” he said.

Molden was the lead researcher in a study to be published in the July issue of Psychological Science. Northwestern University released the study’s major findings April 22. The research suggests that when marriages end in divorce, a key reason could be that the kind of support the spouses need from each other is not present in their marriage.

About the author
David Gibson served for 37 years on the editorial staff at Catholic News Service, where he was the founding and long-time editor of Origins, CNS Documentary Service. David received a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University in Minnesota and an M.A. in religious education from The Catholic University of America. Married for 38 years, he and his wife have three adult daughters and six grandchildren.