Because marriage is an ever-evolving experience, we constantly shift, change and, in some cases, start over. In It’s No Secret, couples share thoughts about commitment and tell us what they have learned along the way. Who Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, 68, and Dr. John Gottman, 77 Occupations The couple, both More
Having a happy spouse can lead to a longer marriage, and now study results show that it’s associated with a longer life, too. More
The countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s threw the American family into chaos. Young adults—educated liberals especially—revolted against the constraints of 1950s family life, engaging seriously with formerly fringe ideas like open marriage and full-time employment for mothers. The old rules were in tatters, and nobody really knew what More
Late last month, the Journal of Marriage and Family published a new study with a somewhat foreboding finding: Couples who lived together before marriage had a lower divorce rate in their first year of marriage, but had a higher divorce rate after five years. It supported earlier research linking premarital More
If you have a happy marriage, “’til death do us part” may be a long ways off. Married people who rated their unions as “very happy” or “pretty happy” had roughly 20% lower odds of dying early than people who said their marriages were “not too happy,” according to a More
Marriage is hard. In fact, there’s evidence it’s getting even harder. Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, argues that’s because our expectations of marriage have increased dramatically in recent decades. “[A] marriage that would have been acceptable to us in the 1950s is a disappointment to us today More
