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Unless your Facebook feed is very different from mine, it cannot have escaped your attention that wedding—and engagement—season is in full swing. Looking at the posts—of beaming brides in white gowns, of couples hand in hand, of proud parents, and cheering onlookers—I wonder how many of these people will stay together for the long haul and whether they’ve talked about what needs to be talked about, according to scientific research at least.
Ironically, before romantic love became the basis for marriage—a game-changer historian Stephanie Coontz dates to the 1700s—marriage was always based in talk since it was a contractual binding of individuals, property, and families. The truth, though, is that marriage is still a contract as anyone who has ever gone through a divorce knows.
Our focus on romantic love as the basis for marriage has a definite downside, though it makes for a pretty picture at the beginning at least. What’s not to like about the guy who hired the skywriter to propose or nestled the ring atop a teeny cupcake? Who doesn’t love those stories of friends who hung out for years and then, out of the blue, realized that love was in the air? Many of the talks we need to have with future life partners are avoided precisely because they tend to be very unromantic and often tender subjects that can reveal the chinks in the relationship romantic love has us look away from. Even though the failure rate of wedded bliss—40% or so—is well- known, each of us is sure it doesn’t apply to us because our love is real and solid.
Marriage is complicated because people are complicated. There’s the truth. Each of us brings into marriage a boatload of usually unarticulated thoughts about what it means to be married—based on what we’ve seen, heard, or experienced or, alternatively, formulated in contrast to our parents’ example—and those unconscious thoughts will influence our behavior and reactions. Marriage has its own set of myths, including one that says that whatever is wrong with your relationship now will be fixed by the commitment marriage represents.
Research, though, offers up some answers to the complexity. For example, for decades, people have touted living together first as a good trial run to see how marriage might go; I will readily admit that I too believed that even though that was not the case in my own starter marriage. Well, it turns out that living together is a lousy idea because, as the work of Scott Stanley and others showed, people tend to “slide” into marriage as a logical next step rather than consciously deliberating. It will surprise no one that these marriages are more likely to be stressed, haven’t developed the kind of cooperative problem-solving that a long-term marriage requires, and have a higher rate of failure.
So here, based in research on both marriage and divorce, are my recommendations for the six talks everyone should have before they tie the knot. I figure I have some personal authority in knowing what doesn’t work having been married more than once.
1.Talk about money.
Of course, money is the one thing no one wants to talk about because it’s so crass, unromantic. and maybe even shallow. Most of us are brought up, moreover, in families that tell us that finances are personal and never to be shared. That said, research shows that disagreement over finances is the number one cause of divorce, trumping infidelity. Money is both real and symbolic at once and that may actually not figure into your purview when you’re engaged to someone and each of you is making money with a separate checking account. You might have noticed that your prospective partner has a different attitude toward money than you do—he might be more cautious or spendthrift than you are, she might seem a bit careless and more in debt than you think is healthy—but that only becomes a joint issue after you’re married. Talking about money includes a discussion of who’ll make the money and how decisions regarding spending are made, exploring attitudes toward debt and saving, and what you’d do if your situation changed (one of you loses her or his job or decides to retool and go back to school, or if someone will stay home with a child.) Making sure that you are capable of agreeing on financial goals is important too.
Talking is important because arguments about money, researcher Jeffrey Dew and his colleagues discovered, aren’t always just about money; they may be reflections of how each partner feels about power, commitment, respect, and fairness in the relationship. Their research suggests that sometimes arguing about money is easier than tackling the deep-seated conflicts and disappointments that are at the heart of a failing marriage. Financial conflicts aren’t just the greatest driver of divorce but they are more frequent and last longer than other kinds of marital conflict.
2.Talk about how you argue.
It’s not whether you argue but how you argue that matters, and there’s a whole body of research that confirms just that. Being conscious and aware of the patterns in your arguments is terrifically important, as experts such as John Gottman make clear. You need to pay attention if one of the really toxic patterns is present such as Demand/Withdraw. This pattern—which has its own acronym DM/W—describes the scenario in which one person makes a demand and the other person withdraws, both literally and emotionally. In most cases, it’s the woman who’s in the demand position but not always; it can also be a function of an imbalance of power in the relationship. For example, if one person makes most or all of the money and considers that entitles him or her to make all the decisions, the person making the demand for change is likely to be the person with less power. Similarly, the person who desires change—whether that’s in structure of the relationship, the allocation of responsibilities or anything else—will likely find him or herself in the demand situation.
The problem with the pattern is that it has escalation built into it. As person A making the demand becomes more and more frustrated by person B’s withdrawal, it’s likely that the he or she will amp up the volume; that, in turn, only makes person B even more inclined to withdraw and perhaps become aggressive or mocking. (“That same old tattoo? Can’t you ever talk about anything else?”) And both parties feel aggrieved.
John Gottman also delineates what he calls the “Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” or behaviors that are bound to bring your marriage down. You and your partner should know about these, be vigilant should they appear, and be prepared to fix them. They are: criticism or attacking someone on the basis of their personality or character, rather than a specific behavior; contempt or consciously intending to abuse or insult your partner; defensiveness which can include refusal to take responsibility, withdrawal, or talking over the person or repeating yourself; and stonewalling which is a component of demand/withdraw.
If your arguments fall into these patterns or are starting to, do not count on your saying vows on a green lawn to fix things. You have to fix them together, consciously.
Because humans are hardwired to be more reactive to bad events and exchanges than good ones (think evolution and a leg up on survival), Gottman’s ration of 5:1—it takes five good exchanges to outweigh a bad one—is echoed in other research. Tuck the number away for the future if you want your marriage to last.
3.Talk about how you understand personality.
This one is much less obvious than the other ones but I think it really packs a wallop. Every marriage will go through periods of stress and, yes, periods when one person’s needs or goals change or one person wants to grow in ways that the other doesn’t. Or it may simply be that one partner isn’t happy with the status quo of the relationship and wants things to change. The work of Carol Dweck and others revealed that your beliefs about personality—whether you believe it’s fixed and immutable or malleable and subject to change—are key to navigating these periods of stress. This isn’t really counterintuitive at all: The more you believe that personality, behavior, and character are malleable, the better you’ll be at negotiating times that require change. You’ll be willing to learn and try, exert effort, address failure, and increase understanding. People who believe that personality is fixed won’t make much effort or put much faith in change and that, in and of itself, can be a deal-breaker.
4. Talk about your models of partnership.
Marriage is a partnership but that partnership can take many different forms, depending on the emotional needs of the people in it. The important thing is to articulate and define how you and your soon-to-be spouse see it: Will it be drawn along traditional lines, with one partner focused on finances and the other on running the day-to-day household needs even if you’re both working, or are you looking for a more egalitarian relationship? How will you balance your or your partner’s need for autonomy while maintaining a mutual intimacy? Some people marry and make few shifts from their former single lives—they still socialize with their own friends and keep their money separate from their spouses—and are content to live on parallel tracks that sometimes interconnect. Others really want to function as a couple pretty much 24/7, melding interests, friends, and assets into a single, shared pool. Being clear about your own needs—your desires for intimacy, for autonomy, for support—must precede the talk.
Even though dependence on a spouse has gotten a bad rep—it’s become synonymous with the 1950s wage earner with wifey in the kitchen—being circling but independent planets may not be the best answer either. There’s the dependency paradox to consider: Contrary to popular lore, knowing you can depend on someone actually makes you more independent, more willing to take risks, be more resilient if initial efforts fail, and more game to explore opportunities as research by Brooke Feeney showed. Keep that in mind.
5. Talk about your childhood experiences.
I’m not talking about your summers in Maine or your years playing Little League or even Spotty, the spaniel you owned as a kid because the chances are that your soon-to-be spouse has heard some of those stories or at least seen flattering pix and videos. I’m talking about the more difficult stuff, especially if your childhood was less than perfect. People tend to shy away from these discussions for lots of reasons but they are an important part of understanding why your partner is the way he or she is. If you’ve noticed that your readings of people’s reactions or emotional situations are different, the answer may lie in your different attachment styles which are a function of childhood.
6.Talk about raising children.
No, not just about what adorable kids the two of you might make together someday but a real discussion about raising them. Alas, because we think about marriage in terms of romance, we often don’t really focus on what kind of a mother or father the partner we’ve chosen for ourselves—the one who thrills us—might make. But I also don’t think I need to remind anyone that disagreements about raising kids are a leading cause of divorce. This talk should follow the discussion about childhood ideally: Are you likely to replicate how you were raised in terms of discipline, expectation, and treatment, or are you in full rebellion? Exploring whether you think a hippy-dippy laissez-faire approach is one you might favor, whether you’ll be the kind of parent who’s going to read up and decide what’s best for the child, or whether you want to try to co-parent as best as you can and throw traditional roles to the wind is part of the territory. And if you have very different visions of how to raise a child, that's worth paying attention to
There’s no way of totally “divorce-proofing” a marriage but an enhanced ability to communicate thoughts and feelings is as close as you can get. Having real talks about real issues before you ride off into the sunset can only help put the two of you on the road you need to be on.
Copyright 2016 Peg Streep
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Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History. New York: Viking, 2005.
Dew, Jeffrey P. and Robert Stewart, “A Financial Issue, A Relationship Issue, or Both? Examining the Predictors of Marital Financial Conflict,” Journal of FinancialTherapy (2012), vol. 3, issue 1, 43-61.
Stanley, Scott M., Galena Kline Rhoades, and Howard J. Markman, “Sliding Versus Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect,” Family Relations 55 (October 2006), 499-509.
Schrodt, Paul, Paul L. Witt, and Jenna R. Shimkowski, "A Meta-Analytical Review of the Demand/Withdraw Pattern of Interaction and its Association with Individual, Relational, and Communicative Outcomes,” Communication Monographs, 81,1 (April 2014), 27-58.
Gottman, John. Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. New York; Fireside, 1994.
Dweck, Carol S., “Can Personality Be Changed? The Role of Beliefs in Personality and Change,” Current Directions in Psychology Science (2008), vol.17, no.6, 391-394.
Feeney, Brooke C. “The Dependency Paradox in Close Relationships: Accepting Dependence promotes Independence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2007), vol, 92, no, 22, 268-285.
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