Shared Reality and Grounded Feelings During Courtship: Do They Matter for Marital Success?

This study provides evidence that newlywed pairs who have a shared and well-grounded understanding of their courtship are better able to establish unions that endure. Using a sample of 168 couples, the authors found that marriages were more likely to survive when courting partners (a) loved each other to a similar degree, (b) depicted the probability of marriage and changes in the likelihood of marriage in a corresponding fashion over the course of their courtship, and (c) portrayed the courtship as escalating from a low (25%) to a high (75%) probability' of marriage as spanning a comparable period of time. The durability of marriages was reflected, as well, in how solidly courting partners' feelings for each other were interwoven with their courtship experiences. More specifically, courtship difficulties were not as associated with weakened feelings of love or with heightened feelings of ambivalence among couples who later divorced as compared to those who stayed married.Key Words: commitment, dating, divorce, intimate relationships, marriage.Many social scientists believe that "the seeds of marital distress and divorce are sown for many couples' ' before they wed (Clements, Stanley, & Markman, 2004, p. 621 ; e.g., Niehuis, Huston, & Rosenband, 2006). Despite this belief, the way courtships foretell marital success remains more a matter of speculation than the focus of a large body of empirical work. We do know, however, that personality traits come into play during courtship in ways that prefigure the emotional climate of marriages (e.g., Huston & Houts, 1998; Kirkpatrick & Hazan, 1994). Research also has shown that premarital couples who are highly critical of each other or who do not make much of an effort to work through their problems establish less satisfying marriages than couples who communicate with little rancor and are more willing to solve their problems through a give-and-take process (e.g., Markman, Rhoades, Stanley, Ragan, & Whitton, 2010). In addition, features of courtships, such as the length, approval by family and friends, cohabitation, and premarital pregnancy are linked to marital satisfaction and divorce (e.g., Booth & Johnson, 1988; Whyte, 1990).Several issues limit our understanding of the links between courtship and marriage. Much of the research has focused on individual features of courtship, such as cohabitation or how well partners communicate during a conflict. Second, although mate selection is the culmination of a process of mutual choice that unfolds over time, few have attempted to describe differences in how partners choose each other (e.g., Orbuch, Veroff, & Holmberg, 1993). Third, researchers largely gauge marital success within just the first few years of marriage (see Clements et ah, 2004, as a notable exception). Fourth, little attention has been given to the idea that suitors differ in the degree to which they develop feelings that are grounded in their interactive experiences.In the present study, we examined whether marital stability is foretold by the extent to which premarital partners experience a shared reality during courtship and how strongly their feelings of love and ambivalence are grounded in features of their courtship experiences. We define shared reality (i.e., concordance, agreement, perceptual congruence) as partners feeling comparable depths of love for one another and showing similar changes in their estimation of the likelihood of marriage. We estimated this concordance using a highly structured protocol in which newlywed husbands and wives independently produced accounts of their courtship from when they first paired as a couple to their wedding day. The spouses depicted the progression of the courtship month by month on graph paper, with time in months on the baseline and the likelihood of marriage on the vertical axis. Because love is seen as an important driving force toward marriage and ambivalence a key psychological barrier, we also gathered information on these feelings using a standard questionnaire that also assessed each partner's perception of the amount of conflict and negativity in the relationship. …