Why marital happiness grows after the golden anniversary

January 8, 2007
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ANN ARBOR—If a married couple can just stick it out for, oh, about 35 years or so, they’re likely to find they’re as happy with each other as they once were as starry-eyed newlyweds. That’s one of the findings from a University of Michigan study of marital quality over the life course, published in the current issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Based on data from the American’s Changing Lives study, a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults aged 25 and older, the study analyzes the links between marital quality, duration and various social and economic factors among 1,470 individuals in first marriages.

“Marital happiness follows a fairly predictable trajectory,” says Terri L. Orbuch, a sociologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research, and the first author of the study.

After the first few years of marriage, the so-called honeymoon period, marital happiness tends to go downhill for the next 20 years. Then, right around the golden anniversary, this downward spiral stops and couples start feeling more satisfied with each other. By the time they’ve been married for 35 years, they’re as happy as newlyweds, on average.

The study by Orbuch and U-M colleagues James S. House, Richard P. Mero and Pamela S. Webster is the first to document the reasons for this remarkable reversal in marital happiness.

“Our results show that declines in work and parental responsibilities explain a large portion of the increase in marital satisfaction in the later years of marriage,” says Orbuch.

“Declining income and increasing assets in later life also explain a small portion of this increase.”

The Michigan study also showed that after 15 to 20 years of marriage, couples don’t think about getting divorced or separated nearly as much as couples who have been married for shorter periods of time.

“For individuals in first marriages, thinking about divorce in later life may be influenced more strongly by the sheer duration of the relationship,” Orbuch speculates, “especially by the commitment that this longevity implies and by a decline in opportunities for remarriage.”

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging.

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