Covenant Marriage: The Movement to Reclaim Tradition in America

Chapter 6: The Ongoing Marriage

98 Chapter 6 The Ongoing Marriage Y The first few years of marriage demand changes and adjustments for most couples. Partners need to reconcile their individual beliefs and concerns and coordinate their public lives and responsibilities. Not only are the partners different individuals, each with personal values and beliefs, but they are also members of various formal and informal organizations such as work, hobbies, clubs, and congregations. Somehow, all these individual differences and commitments must be united into a harmonious, functioning whole. Some couples manage to merge their lives without much difficulty, but others face significant challenges, and often fail. Although the “merger challenge” is something couples must negotiate throughout their married lives, it is typically most demanding in the first few years, when there are fewer patterns, traditions, or tested strategies on which to rely. With time, married people typically settle into routines and come to rely on solutions that have worked for them in the past. But until they do, partners must either experiment with novel solutions, try those used by others, or rely on some guiding principle or philosophy to inform their decisions and choices. Marriage involves fewer choices than living together because marriage comes with traditions and customs. Whether to be cordial to a partner’s mother, for example, is much less of a puzzle for husbands than boyfriends. This chapter considers how couples in both types of marriages change over the first five or six years of their marriage. Do their marriages appear to get better, or worse? We assess this by measuring changes in five aspects of marital quality, as explained in the next section. We also ask whether covenant and standard marriages change in the same ways and for the same reasons. Was it because some couples had weathered more strains to their marriage, or perhaps they had more education, which has been shown to influence marriage? Perhaps they were older. In these comparisons, we must keep in mind that covenant couples differ in important ways from their The Ongoing Marriage 99 standard counterparts even before they marry. Therefore, changes in their marriages may reflect those preexisting differences, or they may reflect something about covenant marriage, per se. To the extent possible, we try to investigate these two possibilities. Measures of Marital Adjustment In our attempt to determine how couples manage these first few years of marriage, we considered three central areas of married life: the quality of their relationship over time; how spouses envision their future together; and their thoughts about their own chances of divorce. We believe that significant negative change in any one of these dimensions is evidence of possible problems. More detail on all aspects of this research is found in appendix D. Marital Quality Four dimensions are widely regarded as fundamentals of marriage quality. We relied on the Dyadic Adjustment Scale developed by Spanier in 1976. Details about the measures are found in appendix D. First is consensus , or the extent of agreement between partners on the essential aspects of married adult life. We considered agreement between partners in matters of finances, religion, in-laws, friends, the division of household labor, and seven other issues (details in appendix D). The second dimension of adjustment is the degree of satisfaction each partner has with various aspects of the marriage. We asked each partner to tell us how often (ranging from “all the time” to “never”) he or she did eight different things (including thinking that things are going well in the marriage , considering ending the marriage, kissing his or her partner, leaving the house after a fight, confiding in his or her partner, or getting on each others’ nerves). The third dimension is cohesion and refers to togetherness, or the extent to which couples engage in activities as a pair. Each partner was asked how often he or she does each of five things with the partner (such as sharing outside interests, calmly discussing an issue, or working together on a project). The fourth dimension is affection and the couple’s sense of their agreement about it. We asked each partner to tell us how often they agree on showing affection, their sex life, and showing love. In addition to these four dimensions, we also considered fairness (measured here by the relative responsibilities each partner has for maintaining 100 Covenant Marriage the household). Perceptions of unfairness in a marriage increase...