Don’t Recommit Yourself to Marriage in 1986

Published December 26, 1985. During the next few days many will be thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Two researchers have a suggestion. Don’t recommit yourself to marriage during the coming year.

I was recently reviewing the November 1985, issue of “The Journal of Marriage and the Family.” One particular article caught my attention. It was written by Clifford H. Swenson of Purdue University and Geir Trahaug from the Bergen, Norway School System. The title was “Commitment and the Long-Term Marriage Relationship.”

Their recommendations? Don’t be committed to marriage, be committed to the person you married. According to the two researchers, there is a major difference between the two types of commitment.

With commitment to marriage as an institution, studies indicate that both marital satisfaction and the amount of love expressed by couples tend to decline the longer the couples are married. The question, then, is logically asked, “Why do couples marry and stay married? To many it is the moral and right thing to do, “For better or worse, in sickness and in health,” etc. Marrying and staying married is socially sanctioned and approved.

But Swensen and Trahaug point to another type of commitment, that is to a spouse as a person or individual, and not necessarily to the relationship you have. A person-centered type of commitment, according to the authors, “makes it possible to drop pretenses and to be open in the expression of thoughts and feelings. Thus, this kind of relationship makes it possible for a couple to develop a greater intimacy than would otherwise be possible.”

The authors devised a study to see if the decline in marital satisfaction and the amount of love expressed also occurred in person-centered commitment. They hypothesized that married couples marry and remained married because their commitment to a spouse as a person expresses more love. In addition, they will have fewer problems than couples who married because of the advantages of an institutional commitment to marriage.

Thirty-six couples from Bergen, Norway participated in the study. They had been married for approximately 37 years on average. They ranged in age from 59 to 71 years (mean of 66.7) and had an average of 2.5 children. When contacted, they agreed to participate in a series of tests and questionnaires.

They were asked, among other things, why they married the person they did and why they had chosen to stay married? They were also asked to disclose, anonymously, the marital problems they had encountered during their marriage and how effectively they felt they had dealt with them.

The results? The hypotheses were confirmed statistically. Those couples who were committed to marriage as an institution followed the common trend of decreased marital satisfaction and less love expressed during the latter years of marriage. Those couples, however, who were committed to a spouse as a person – not a partner in a relationship – reported an actual increase in both marital satisfaction and the amount of love expressed the longer they were married.

The person-committed couples also indicated they had fewer marital problems. Interesting results.

Rather than recommit yourself to your marriage for a New Year’s resolution, recommit yourself to the person you married. If you do, according to Swensen and Trahaug, you’ll likely see some positive results during the years ahead.

Happy Holidays from the Barlows!