At the first interview, one of the questions asked was how they would rate their marriage on a scale of one to seven, "one"
being just awful and "seven" being fabulous. I analyzed the people who had rated their marriages as bad in a couple of different ways. First, I looked at those who said, "On a one-to-seven scale, my marriage is a one." I then found the data for almost all those who had said their marriages were awful and looked at the same question when they were interviewed again, five years later. I found that only about 10 percent of the people who had said that their marriages were terrible had divorced. The vast majority had stayed together. Of those who said in 1987 that their marriages were awful, 87 percent said five years later that their marriages were either pretty good or very good, either a "six" or "seven."
I did the same analysis looking at people who said "one," "two," or "three"-anything bad-in 1987, and five years later, three-fifths of them were in the top two categories in marital satisfaction. We don't know if they got therapy, but most of them probably didn't. Most of the marriages that were bad became much better. I think in a lot of cases when marriages are unhappy it's sort of a bad patch, and it doesn't last. One reason divorce is relatively high in our society is because now either person can leave, and we are more willing to leave than we used to be if we hit a bad patch. We're less likely to work it through. But there's evidence that dramatic turnarounds are commonplace. They're the typical experience.
Even in 1972 she found, as everyone else had, that married women were happier than single women. She reported the findings for men in the text of the book and reported the findings for women in the appendix. She discounted the positive results for married women with reasoning that, "Well, women are happy only because they are meeting a socially valued goal [marriage]. So, they're just doing what they're told. And that's why they're saying they're happy. But in fact, their psychiatric symptoms are at such a high level that we have to think they are just deluding themselves." She asserts in the book that some societies bind girls' feet, but in our society, we bind girls' psyches, and marriage actually makes women crazy.
She did no original research for the book and there were critiques when it was published, but the book and her message that marriage was bad for women came at a time when the women's movement was just beginning. Politically it caught a wave and entered the general culture as accepted wisdom. You still see her ideas in marriage textbooks, as if they were established fact-the earth is round and marriage is bad for women. I don't think the case for that conclusion was ever good.
In the meantime we've developed much better measures of psychological well-being and much better analytic measures. The world has changed in ways that have made marriage different for women than it used to be. The most recent research, which again uses the National Survey of Families and Households, looks at measures of emotional well-being when people were interviewed in the late 1980s. It follows them over the next five years and uses the same measures of emotional well-being again. During that period some of the people stayed married, some got married, some got divorced, some stayed divorced, some got married, divorced, and remarried, some became widowed-you can compare changes in emotional well-being, because you have the same measures for people in these different groups.
This research shows that if you take people who were married the whole time as the comparison group-the baseline-then all the others basically do worse on almost all nine measures of emotional well-being. The sole exception is people who got married for the first time-they did better. What is really interesting is they found no differences between men and women on any of the measures. For both men and women, the married did the best and everyone else did worse, except those who got married for the first time.
What's also interesting is there's an argument in the literature that divorced people are often upset, unhappy, and emotionally troubled because divorce is a strain. But, according to this argument, once you get through that transition, basically you're fine. It's just the transition that's tough. In fact, what they've found is that those people who
were divorced during the five 
years from one interview to the other did substantially worse than the married people. So being in the transition created by divorce wasn't a risk factor for poor emotional well-being, but being divorced, possibly several years after the transition phase, was related to poor emotional well-being when compared to that of married people.
Jessie Bernard's conclusion that marriage is good for men and bad for women was based only on psychological well-being, but we've taken that message and applied it, or thought it applied, to marriage more generally. There was never evidence on any other dimension that marriage was a good deal for men and a bad deal for women, and there are lots of other dimensions to consider.
What's interesting is that the rates of interpersonal violence are also lower for married men. The same things that put people at risk for violence generally put people at risk for intimate violence-being poor, being poorly educated, being relatively young, being black, and being unmarried. Again, the National Survey of Families and Households asks people the extent to which arguments between them during the last year had become physical. And then, if they had become physical, whether one partner had hit, kicked, or shoved the other partner. And then, if that had happened, who had done it. "Did you kick?" "Did your partner kick?" Given that you know the gender of the respondent you can figure out male-to-female violence and female-to-male violence.
I looked at rates of violence for married couples and for cohabiting couples taking into account their characteristics-how old they were, how long they'd been together, their education, and their race. I found that for married couples, rates of domestic violence male-to-female are about the same as female-to-male. Therefore, when couples are violent, generally both are violent. Women are as likely to initiate violence as men are.
Now that's only part of the story because obviously the size difference means that if someone is seriously hurt, it's generally the woman. And this ignores serious violence of the kind that sends people to shelters and emergency rooms-which is almost exclusively man-against-woman. In addition, the proportion of people who said there had been violence in their relationship was about twice as high for cohabiting couples compared to married couples, and with cohabiting couples the male-to-female violence was higher.
The literature argues that there are different types of cohabiting couples, one being the engaged couples who are just waiting
for their hall to be rented (e.g., they rented the hall for October and it's March), but on lots of dimensions they look very much like already-married couples. Then there are what I call the uncommitted cohabiters, who have no plans to marry and who look, on almost every outcome we can measure, worse. In looking at domestic violence I found that, although levels of domestic violence were lower for engaged cohabiting couples, they were still much higher than for married couples. So, if you had to make an argument against domestic violence, you'd say either never have a relationship with a man if you're a woman, and never have a relationship with a woman if you're a man, or you're better off married. If you're going to have a boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, a husband, an ex-husband-someone you live with-you're better off to be married to that person. The argument is that when you get married, you become socially connected to a whole set of people who have an incentive to help you reduce violence. You have your wife's brothers, you have the people at work, and that actually helps-it inhibits violence in married couples. Also, because married couples have more to lose if the relationship ends, their commitment to the relationship reduces violence.
being just awful and "seven" being fabulous. I analyzed the people who had rated their marriages as bad in a couple of different ways. First, I looked at those who said, "On a one-to-seven scale, my marriage is a one." I then found the data for almost all those who had said their marriages were awful and looked at the same question when they were interviewed again, five years later. I found that only about 10 percent of the people who had said that their marriages were terrible had divorced. The vast majority had stayed together. Of those who said in 1987 that their marriages were awful, 87 percent said five years later that their marriages were either pretty good or very good, either a "six" or "seven."I did the same analysis looking at people who said "one," "two," or "three"-anything bad-in 1987, and five years later, three-fifths of them were in the top two categories in marital satisfaction. We don't know if they got therapy, but most of them probably didn't. Most of the marriages that were bad became much better. I think in a lot of cases when marriages are unhappy it's sort of a bad patch, and it doesn't last. One reason divorce is relatively high in our society is because now either person can leave, and we are more willing to leave than we used to be if we hit a bad patch. We're less likely to work it through. But there's evidence that dramatic turnarounds are commonplace. They're the typical experience.
Even in 1972 she found, as everyone else had, that married women were happier than single women. She reported the findings for men in the text of the book and reported the findings for women in the appendix. She discounted the positive results for married women with reasoning that, "Well, women are happy only because they are meeting a socially valued goal [marriage]. So, they're just doing what they're told. And that's why they're saying they're happy. But in fact, their psychiatric symptoms are at such a high level that we have to think they are just deluding themselves." She asserts in the book that some societies bind girls' feet, but in our society, we bind girls' psyches, and marriage actually makes women crazy.
She did no original research for the book and there were critiques when it was published, but the book and her message that marriage was bad for women came at a time when the women's movement was just beginning. Politically it caught a wave and entered the general culture as accepted wisdom. You still see her ideas in marriage textbooks, as if they were established fact-the earth is round and marriage is bad for women. I don't think the case for that conclusion was ever good.
In the meantime we've developed much better measures of psychological well-being and much better analytic measures. The world has changed in ways that have made marriage different for women than it used to be. The most recent research, which again uses the National Survey of Families and Households, looks at measures of emotional well-being when people were interviewed in the late 1980s. It follows them over the next five years and uses the same measures of emotional well-being again. During that period some of the people stayed married, some got married, some got divorced, some stayed divorced, some got married, divorced, and remarried, some became widowed-you can compare changes in emotional well-being, because you have the same measures for people in these different groups.
This research shows that if you take people who were married the whole time as the comparison group-the baseline-then all the others basically do worse on almost all nine measures of emotional well-being. The sole exception is people who got married for the first time-they did better. What is really interesting is they found no differences between men and women on any of the measures. For both men and women, the married did the best and everyone else did worse, except those who got married for the first time.
What's also interesting is there's an argument in the literature that divorced people are often upset, unhappy, and emotionally troubled because divorce is a strain. But, according to this argument, once you get through that transition, basically you're fine. It's just the transition that's tough. In fact, what they've found is that those people who
were divorced during the five years from one interview to the other did substantially worse than the married people. So being in the transition created by divorce wasn't a risk factor for poor emotional well-being, but being divorced, possibly several years after the transition phase, was related to poor emotional well-being when compared to that of married people.Jessie Bernard's conclusion that marriage is good for men and bad for women was based only on psychological well-being, but we've taken that message and applied it, or thought it applied, to marriage more generally. There was never evidence on any other dimension that marriage was a good deal for men and a bad deal for women, and there are lots of other dimensions to consider.
What's interesting is that the rates of interpersonal violence are also lower for married men. The same things that put people at risk for violence generally put people at risk for intimate violence-being poor, being poorly educated, being relatively young, being black, and being unmarried. Again, the National Survey of Families and Households asks people the extent to which arguments between them during the last year had become physical. And then, if they had become physical, whether one partner had hit, kicked, or shoved the other partner. And then, if that had happened, who had done it. "Did you kick?" "Did your partner kick?" Given that you know the gender of the respondent you can figure out male-to-female violence and female-to-male violence.
I looked at rates of violence for married couples and for cohabiting couples taking into account their characteristics-how old they were, how long they'd been together, their education, and their race. I found that for married couples, rates of domestic violence male-to-female are about the same as female-to-male. Therefore, when couples are violent, generally both are violent. Women are as likely to initiate violence as men are.
Now that's only part of the story because obviously the size difference means that if someone is seriously hurt, it's generally the woman. And this ignores serious violence of the kind that sends people to shelters and emergency rooms-which is almost exclusively man-against-woman. In addition, the proportion of people who said there had been violence in their relationship was about twice as high for cohabiting couples compared to married couples, and with cohabiting couples the male-to-female violence was higher.
The literature argues that there are different types of cohabiting couples, one being the engaged couples who are just waiting
for their hall to be rented (e.g., they rented the hall for October and it's March), but on lots of dimensions they look very much like already-married couples. Then there are what I call the uncommitted cohabiters, who have no plans to marry and who look, on almost every outcome we can measure, worse. In looking at domestic violence I found that, although levels of domestic violence were lower for engaged cohabiting couples, they were still much higher than for married couples. So, if you had to make an argument against domestic violence, you'd say either never have a relationship with a man if you're a woman, and never have a relationship with a woman if you're a man, or you're better off married. If you're going to have a boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, a husband, an ex-husband-someone you live with-you're better off to be married to that person. The argument is that when you get married, you become socially connected to a whole set of people who have an incentive to help you reduce violence. You have your wife's brothers, you have the people at work, and that actually helps-it inhibits violence in married couples. Also, because married couples have more to lose if the relationship ends, their commitment to the relationship reduces violence.
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