Marriage Series: A Good Marriage is a Matter of Life and Death
Is this an exaggeration? It is a well-known fact that married people generally live longer than divorced or single people. Less known is that spouses who describe their marriage as satisfying live longer than spouses who describe their marriage as unsatisfying. These differences can contribute to better health and can add over five years to a life span.
This is not magic. Marital conflict not only stimulates the “stress hormone,” cortisol, but also epinephrine, norepinephrine and the growth hormone involved in energy production. Combined, these take a toll on the body, making it more prone to illnesses and shortening life span. Marital satisfaction, including physical affection, does the opposite – producing what we will call the “happy” hormones (dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin). These can improve health and increase life expectancy.
A Good Question: What causes these major differences between happy versus unhappy marriages? Do satisfied spouse just luckily have fewer disagreements and less conflict? Do they have more money? Are their jobs more satisfying?
The Answer: People in satisfying marriages have as many conflicts and disagreements as people in dissatisfying marriages. Satisfied couples simply have good disagreement resolution skills, which get solutions that work for both spouses. In addition, they do it quickly and recover quickly from any emotional damage or stress that was caused by the disagreement. Please read on!
First courtship; then marriage. To understand this, we need to return to the roots of marital conflict. Most people marry when they have fallen in love with someone who seems like a good match. They usually learn during the getting-to-know-you phase whether or not there are some obvious deal-breakers (e.g., one wants children and the other does not) or significant personality clashes. If the odds look good enough to take the plunge they marry, even knowing that a fairly significant number of people like them end up divorcing.
Differences emerge after marriage, which can lead to disagreements. While spouses can be more or less compatible, all spouses are significantly different from one another. They grew up in different families, with different experiences throughout their lives before they met. Their values, interests, relationships with family and friends all have differences. Over time in a marriage, differences spawn disagreements. Keep in mind that this is as true of satisfied spouses as it is for dissatisfied spouses.
The difference between happy versus unhappy marriages is how they handle their disagreements.
Happy couples meet certain necessary conditions (rules) for a successful marriage and have skills for resolving disagreements well and quickly.
Rules.I another blog on this website, we discuss one of those rules: impeccable honesty. It is likely worth your time to read that blog at this point. Impeccable honesty is one of the nine conditions/rules that we describe in our book: The Road to Marital Success is Unpaved: Seven Skills for Making Marriage Work.
Skills. If a couple meets the nine basic conditions, the next hurdle is whether or not they have skills for successfully resolving disagreements. Our research[1] has identified seven skills.
Disagreement resolution skills matter. Low skill spouses lack the ability to resolve disagreements in a satisfying manner. Disagreements tend to escalate and cause the focus to move from the point of the disagreement to criticizing one another, with an escalation of negative emotions. Over time, unresolved disagreements and those criticisms become increasingly negative opinions of each other. It can reach the point that they no longer see much good in one another and fall out of love, or so it seems. The things that they once liked about one another and their love has simply gone underground, overwhelmed by their frustration and criticisms. Without the skills for resolving disagreements well, they will likely have awful arguments or live in a cold war. When with one another, they will be too much stress hormones and not enough happy hormones. In addition, both spouses will likely become vulnerable to big mistakes, like alcohol abuse or affairs. Or, they just get a divorce.
As stated earlier, couples with good disagreement resolution skills get solutions that work for both spouses. In addition, they do it quickly, and they recover quickly from any emotional damage or stress that was caused by the disagreement.
In other words, they have bad days, when they have stress hormones, but get good solutions and spend very little time in conflict. That opens up the rest of the marital time for having a good time with one another, and having happy hormones. Working together, they build a great deal of emotional capital, making their marriage rewarding in many other ways.
Summary. In our book, The Road to Marital Success is Unpaved: Seven Skills for Making Marital Success, we identify the nine conditions for a successful marriage and the seven skills that make the difference. The book not only describes those skills, it also provides guidance and exercises for learning them. From day one, learning the skills and working on improving the marriage should be fun. Improving a marriage should not take “work,” even though learning skills can take some effort.
The motto in the book is, If you are not having fun, you are not doing it right. Remember, it is a matter of life and death!
[1] Ken and colleague Eileen McCarten examined the literature to identify skills and conducted their own original research on skills and marital conflict.
