Commitment Processes in Accounts of the Development of Premarital Relationships

Surra, Catherine A.; Hughes, Debra K.

doi:10.2307/353658

Cited by 162 publications

(161 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…When the context is stressful (e.g., financial strain, conflicts with family and friends), spouses will have less energy to devote to the relationship, and consequently marital satisfaction should be lower. A number of studies of civilian marriages find evidence consistent with these hypotheses, showing that marital satisfaction does tend to be lower in spouses facing higher levels of external stress (e.g., Tesser and Beach, 1998) and higher for couples surrounded by supportive family and friends (e.g., Surra and Hughes, 1997), and that these associations are mediated by the effort that spouses devote to relationship maintenance (e.g., Neff and Karney, 2004).…”

Section: An Integrative Framework To Account For the Success And Failmentioning

confidence: 91%

Families Under Stress: An Assessment of Data, Theory, and Research on Marriage and Divorce in the Military

Karney¹,

Crown²

2007

PsycEXTRA Dataset

175

269

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Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to a penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number. This product is part of the RAND Corporation monograph series.RAND monographs present major research findings that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND monographs undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity. The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The research was conducted in the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the OSD, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community under Contract DASW01-01-C-0004. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataKarney, Benjamin R. PrefaceSince the onset of the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the demands on the military have been higher than they have been at any time since the Vietnam War. In particular, deployments, especially for the Army and the Marine Corps, have been longer, more frequent, and more dangerous than they have been in the past. In the summer and fall of 2005, briefings delivered to Dr. David Chu, Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, raised concerns that these lengthy separations were leading to rising divorce rates among military families. Those concerns, in turn, raised broader questions about the effects of military service on military marriages and about the most effective ways of addressing the needs of military families. The overarching goal of the research and analyses described in this monograph is to provide an empirical and theoretical foundation for discussions of these issues. In pursuit of this goal, we ask three questions. First, what has the accumulated research and theory on military marriages contributed to an understanding of how and why military marriages succeed or fail? To address this question, we reviewed the existing theoretical and empirical literature on military marriage, identifying the strengths and limitations of this literature for understanding the effects of deployment on marriages in the current environment. Second, how have rates of transition into and out of marriag...

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Section: An Integrative Framework To Account For the Success And Failmentioning

confidence: 91%

Families Under Stress: An Assessment of Data, Theory, and Research on Marriage and Divorce in the Military

Karney¹,

Crown²

2007

PsycEXTRA Dataset

175

269

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“…Rusbult (1980) and colleagues (Rusbult, Verette, Whitney, Slovik, & Lipkus, 1991) have repeatedly shown with nonmarital relationships that satisfaction is only one component of stability. Surra and Hughes (1997) have found that satisfaction and stability might ebb and flow in some types of nonmarital romantic relationships. Moreover, concerning marriage, extensive theorizing by Lewis and Spanier (1979) and empirical research by Stanley and Markman (1992) show that satisfaction and stability in marriage are different, but related, constructs.…”

Section: Program Effectiveness and Cost-effectivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic hope-focused relationship-enrichment counseling with individual couples.

Worthington

Hight²,

Ripley³

et al. 1997

Journal of Counseling Psychology

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Strategic hope-focused relationship enrichment is a brief, eclectic, research-based program to enhance couples' relationships. Couples (N = 51; 16 married, 24 cohabiting, 11 engaged) completed 5 sessions of enrichment counseling (n -26) or 3 written assessments (n = 25) from 1 of 12 counselors. Couples receiving enrichment counseling had higher relationship satisfaction and quality-of-couple skills at posttest and at the 3-week follow-up than did written-assessment-only (control) couples. Conditions did not differ in terms of quality of overall attraction or 2 measures of commitment. We concluded that relationship enrichment using this program was effective, powerful, and cost-effective. Future research should focus on testing the effectiveness of the program presented in a group format.

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“…Social scientists have theorized about the paths that couples follow to reach the level of commitment involved in a marriage and about the implications that alternative processes have on the durability of the resulting marriages. Family relations researchers have distinguished between internal processes, such as relationship-and dedication-driven processes, which occur over time as couples learn about each other, their compatibility, and the quality of a potential union, and external processes, such as event-and constraint-driven processes, which occur as events happen to couples that change their outlook on their relationship or the desirability of marriage (see, e.g., Surra and Hughes 1997;Surra, Arizzi and Asmussen 1988;and Stanley, Rhoades and Markman 2006; but also see Ogolsky, Surra and Kale 2016 for a description of more complex patterns). These conceptual approaches generally predict that externally-driven processes will produce more vulnerable and less durable marriages, on average, than internally-driven processes.…”

Section: "The Easiest Day For My Poor Memory To Remember Was 9-9-09 mentioning

confidence: 99%

Not Your Lucky Day: Romantically and Numerically Special Wedding Date Divorce Risks

Kabátek

Ribar

2016

SSRN Journal

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What a difference a day makes! Using data from government registries on all the weddings that occurred in the Netherlands from 1999-2013, we find that weddings that occurred on Valentine's Day, dates with the same numbers for the day, month and year like 9 September 1999 (9.9.99), and dates with numbers for the day, month, and year in an ascending sequence like 1 February 2003 (1.2.03) were both exceptionally popular and also much more likely to end in divorce compared to weddings that occurred on ordinary dates.How popular? There were nearly three times as many weddings in the Netherlands on a given Valentine's Day than on other comparable days in February, and there were six times as many weddings on a given same-number day as on a comparable ordinary day.However, the special-day marriages proved to be fragile. By what would have been their ninth anniversaries, 21 percent of Valentine's Day marriages and 19 percent of same-number-date marriages were estimated to fail, but only 16 percent of ordinary-date marriages were estimated to fail. In relative terms, Valentine's Day marriages were about one-third more likely to fail by their ninth anniversaries and same-number-date marriages, about one-quarter more likely to fail than ordinary-date marriages. We continue to find large differences in divorce risks even after we use statistical methods to account for characteristics that might affect both the choice to marry on a special date and marriage vulnerability.Although an analysis of quirky wedding dates is unusual, our results match predictions from wellknown family-relations theories of how commitments deepen in couple relationships, especially the "sliding vs. deciding" theory. From this theory, "deciding" couples choose to marry because of what they learn about each other and about their compatibility over the course of their relationships. In contrast, "sliding" couples slip into marriage because constraints to exiting the relationship, such as the costs of moving or of separating bank accounts, gradually build and make marriage seem worthwhile, even if the couple is less compatible. The timing of "deciding" couples' marriages will depend on how information about their relationships develop, while the timing of "sliding" couples' marriages may be more influenced by external events, like the opportunity to marry on a romantically or numerically special day. Consistent with this theory, we also find that special-day couples are less alike and less well-matched at the start of their marriages compared to ordinary-day couples.

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Commitment Processes in Accounts of the Development of Premarital Relationships

Cited by 162 publications

References 10 publications

Families Under Stress: An Assessment of Data, Theory, and Research on Marriage and Divorce in the Military

Families Under Stress: An Assessment of Data, Theory, and Research on Marriage and Divorce in the Military

Strategic hope-focused relationship-enrichment counseling with individual couples.

Not Your Lucky Day: Romantically and Numerically Special Wedding Date Divorce Risks

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