We pause now from our regularly scheduled blogging to bring you a… chart. Okay before you just skip over this post as a useless exercise in stats, bear with me. What I’m about to explain in this post is probably one of the most helpful things I’ve come across in my counseling career and one of the things that my clients, time in and time out, report as being one of the most helpful pieces of information they get during our time together. In fact, this entire blog series is developed because of this chart. Interested? Good. This chart is often referred to as the “U-shaped Curve of Marital Satisfaction” and you will find it in all of its glory below:
On first blush this chart may be one of the more depressing things you’ve seen, especially if you are on the left side of that adolescent child floor. But the reality is that it isn’t as bad as it may appear. My Stats professor would’ve hated this chart because it is misleading. You see the bottom of the chart isn’t really zero. The person who created the chart (or in this case recreated the chart) is trying to emphasize the fact that on average a marriage has seasons that are tougher than others. However if you were to really put the satisfaction scores on the left you would see that at their peak women score a 9.5 and bottom out at 7 while men peak at 9 and also bottom out at a 7. So you see even during the tough seasons on average you are only 2 – 2.5 points (on a 10 point scale) lower than when you were at your peak. And even then you are still scoring above average. Here, take a look:
In reality then, this chart should be encouraging! If that’s true, should we throw the chart away as a piece of propaganda cooked up by marriage therapist to get you into therapy? I don’t think so. As I’ve said above, I’ve found that most clients (once they get over the initial shock of what appears to be a sharp decline) find this chart to be helpful because it mirrors their lives. It reminds them that they are normal when they’ve got a teenager in the house and it seems that every day is some new crisis. It helps to instill a sense of grace and mercy for themselves and their partner knowing that it may be that they are just in a tough season of life. Further, it has helped clients who fear that initial ecstatic rush of infatuation. For them to see that it is normal and that it doesn’t necessarily lead to disappointment or bad decisions allows them to enjoy that phase of a relationship more readily. Lastly, it seems to instill hope. For men the final stage of the relationship is more satisfying than any other and to know that they can look forward to this stage is exciting. For women to know that they can reach that same ecstatic feeling again later in the relationship also helps them to endure some of the rougher times a marriage can throw at them.
There’s a caveat though. Doesn’t it seem like there is always a caveat? The caveat this time is that this is the satisfaction scores for couples who would generally characterize their marriages as “Happy.” What does that mean exactly? It doesn’t mean that these people always feel happy in their marriages. Instead couples were asked in a large national survey (done by the same person who helped develop the PREPARE/ENRICH that we use for our pre-marital couples) whether they would generally characterize their marriage as “happy” or “unhappy“. These couple selected happy and then they further separated the scores by gender to create the chart above. However, look what happens when they compared “happy couples” (HC) average scores to “unhappy couples” (UC) average scores:
The difference is stupendous! The HC at their most unsatisfied (adolescent children) are still more satisfied that the UC when they are at their peak (without children)! And by the time you get to the end of the relationship the HC group is scoring above a 9 whereas the UC group is just above a 5. That means that the “happy couples” are almost twice as satisfied as “unhappy couples”. Now this may seem obvious and maybe it is, but what most people don’t realize is that you don’t have to stay on either of these tracks. If a particularly difficult crisis were to befall your family and you don’t get help, you may find yourself moving from the HC group to the UC group. More encouragingly though, if you and your spouse seek counseling, are willing to work on yourselves (that whole splinter and log thing) and make some serious changes in your life, you could move from the UC group to the HC group. Could you imagine that? Doubling the satisfaction that you currently feel in your marriage and feeling more satisfied about your marriage than you ever have. In fact there is limited data to say that those that move from unhappy to happy have a larger likelihood of having a lasting relationship than those that started off happy because even when things get rough, comparatively it’s still better than when they were at their worst!
So then, the point here is that you should bookmark this page or copy these charts (you have my permission) for reference because from here on out, we will be using them to help us understand how a relationship usually develops post marriage. Also, we are going to be assuming that you fall in the HC category because that’s where most of the research on the average relationship cycle has been concentrated. That doesn’t mean I will ignore those in a difficult marriage but it means that when we get to adolescence and I mention that this is usually the beginning of the most difficult stage of marriage, that that statement would not be true for a couple who would characterize their marriage as generally unhappy.
Next stop, married without children!
Have you jumped from one track to the other? Would you say that this chart is generally accurate? I’d love to hear your feedback!
-Josh Squires
