Title: Key Factors That Impact Your Odds of Marital Success | Psychology Today
Headings: Key Factors That Impact Your Odds of Marital Success
Shauna H Springer Ph.D.
Key Factors That Impact Your Odds of Marital Success
Well-educated individuals spend more time dating a potential spouse.
THE BASICS

Content: They do not leave their futures—including their marriages—up to chance, but instead proceed through life in a very intentional manner. Many have delayed receiving their relatively high incomes for several years to pursue graduate degrees. Similarly, the married respondents in my well-educated sample ( The Lifestyle Poll) indicated that they spent an average of 3.6 years dating their husbands before committing to marriage. This is much longer than the 2 year relationship “trial period” suggested by some theorists. These quite happily married women knew what they were looking for and spent considerable time building their relationships before making the decision to partner for life with their husbands. Within the Lifestyle Poll sample, the average age at marriage was also significantly higher than the average age of marriage for the population at large. Specifically, the average age at marriage for women in the Lifestyle Poll sample was 27.17 and the average age for their husbands was 28.94. The average age of marriage across the United States for the same time period was 23.6 for women and 25.8 for men*, so the men and women in this sample were 3 to 3.5 years older on average at the time of marriage. I suppose the relatively high average age of marriage in the Lifestyle Poll sample would explain a curious personal experience that I once had that has never been repeated at other weddings I’ve attended. I was attending a close friend’s wedding at the Harvard Club of New York, an elegant “Harvard on Harvard” marriage.