Executive Summary
Every serious relationship marks certain big milestones, from the first kiss to the DTR (“defining the relationship”) talk. The order of those milestones could be called the relationship sequence. Today, the typical relationship sequence is radically different than it was for much of American history. In the past, especially for women, the relationship sequence that most aimed to follow went like this: courtship led to marriage, which led to sex, cohabitation, and children. Today, marriage comes near the end of the line. About ninety percent of couples have sex before marriage, according to one study, and about four in ten babies are born to unmarried parents. Most couples live together before getting married. Couples, in other words, build a lot of history, both together and with prior partners, before deciding to spend their lives together.
This relationship sequence—with sex, cohabitation, and sometimes children preceding marriage—has become the norm in our society. But it raises some interesting questions. Do our premarital experiences, both with others and our future spouse, affect our marital happiness and stability down the line? Do our prior romantic entanglements harm our chances of marital bliss? And once we find “the one,” do the choices we make and experiences we have together as a couple before and on the big day influence our ability to have a successful marriage? These questions are important, of course, because about 80 percent of today’s young adults report that marriage is an important part of their life plans.
To answer these questions, we analyzed new data from the Relationship Development Study. Between 2007 and 2008, more than one thousand Americans who were unmarried but in a relationship, and between age 18 and 34, were recruited into the study. Over the course of the next five years, 418 of those individuals got married. We looked closely at those 418 new marriages. We examined the history of the spouses’ relationship, looked at their prior romantic experiences, and asked them about the quality of their marriages. After analyzing the data, we came to three major conclusions that we will discuss in greater depth in this report:
- What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas, so to speak. Our past experiences, especially when it comes to love, sex, and children, are linked to our future marital quality.
- Some couples slide through major relationship transitions, while others make intentional decisions about moving through them. The couples in the latter category fare better.
- Choices about weddings seem to say something important about the quality of marriages.
Our first major conclusion challenges what we’ll call the Vegas Fallacy—the idea that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Actually, what people do before marriage appears to matter. Specifically, how they conduct their romantic lives before they tie the knot is linked to their odds of having happy marriages.
Consider sex. The vast majority of Americans—about 90 percent—have sex before marriage. Many of them have sex with multiple partners before finding the person they will eventually marry. Do premarital sexual relationships relate to later marital quality? Yes and no. It depends on who you are having sex with. Men and women who only slept with their (future) spouse prior to marriage reported higher marital quality than those who had other sexual partners as well. Further, for women, having had fewer sexual partners before marriage was also related to higher marital quality. This doesn’t mean that sex before marriage will doom a marriage, but sex with many different partners may be risky if you’re looking for a high-quality marriage.
Our second major conclusion revolves around the way people go through important relationship transitions. “Sliding versus deciding” is a theme we’ll return to throughout the entire report. Relationships, as we have mentioned, go through various important milestones—like having sex for the first time, moving in together, getting engaged, getting married, and having children. Each transition involves consequential decisions: Do we move in together after we’re engaged or before, or do we wait until after we marry? Do we have kids before we get married or after? Do we want to have a wedding or elope? How couples handle these choices seems to matter. Some make definitive decisions that move them from one stage of a relationship to another. Others are less intentional. Rather than consciously deciding how and when to transition to the next stage of the relationship, they slide through milestones without prior planning. Our findings show that couples who slide through their relationship transitions have poorer marital quality than those who make intentional decisions about major milestones.
Decisions matter. At times of important transitions, the process of making a decision sets up couples to make stronger commitments with better follow-through as they live them out. This is undoubtedly why all cultures have rituals that add force to major decisions about the pathway ahead. We tend to ritualize experiences that are important. Couples who decide rather than slide are saying “our relationship is important, so let’s think about what we’re doing here.” Making time to talk clearly about potential transitions may contribute to better marriages.
Our final set of findings is related to the biggest ritual of most relationships: the wedding. We discovered that having more guests at the wedding is associated with higher marital quality. This pattern held when we controlled for factors such as income and education, which are proxies for how much the wedding might have cost. It may be that having community support both while you date and through your marriage is very important for marital quality. One obvious objection to this study is that it may be capturing what social scientists call “selection effects” rather than a causal relationship between our independent variables and the outcome at hand. That is, this report’s results may reflect the fact that certain types of people are more likely to engage in certain behaviors—such as having a child prior to marriage— that are correlated with experiencing lower odds of marital quality. It could be that these underlying traits or experiences, rather than the behaviors we analyzed, explain the associations reported here. This objection applies to most research that is not based on randomized experiments. We cannot prove causal associations between the personal and couple factors we explore and marital quality.
We do control for a range of variables, such as education, race/ethnicity, and religiousness, that might otherwise explain the association between the factors this study analyzes and marital quality. We also track our respondents longitudinally over time, so we know that their behaviors precede their marital outcomes and not vice versa. Moreover, we offer explanations for why we think the experiences of the men and women in this study might plausibly have an impact on their marital futures. Finally, we believe that arguments about selection can be taken too far, and end up implying deterministically that individuals have no power to affect their odds of achieving success in relationships or other areas. We take the view that both selection and personal choices matter for how life unfolds. In this report, we focus more attention on experiences that people can control to some degree. With the help of our research, we hope current and future couples will better understand the factors that appear to contribute to building a healthy, loving marriage in contemporary America.