A new study compared people who had a “soulmate” vision of marriage (focused on emotional and sexual intimacy) with people who had a more institutional view (focused on raising children and financial cooperation) to see who had better relationships. Using data from a survey of 1,414 married men and women in Louisiana, researchers arrived at the following conclusion: It’s complicated.
People who took the soulmate route had higher levels of conflict and divorce. So that seems bad. But the evidence suggested that soulmaters were happier, at least until they started yelling at each other and calling lawyers. No matter your view of marriage, it seemed that having friends and family who were supportive of your union was an important factor in its survival. The better your social network, the less likely you are to have problems.
As the authors acknowledge, trying to ferret out a single characteristic of a successful marriage doesn’t get you very far. And, honestly, after reading the paper several times, I’m not sure I fully understand its conclusions. Part of the issue, I think, is that the paper is looking at two very different criteria: How to make a marriage last and how to make a marriage happy. For instance, one way to make a marriage last, according to the paper, is to be part of a religious community. But that doesn’t help all the lonely agnostics out there.
It does seem clear, though, that while attitude—whether you’re searching for a perfect match or just someone to help with dishes and diapers—plays a role, there are a host of external factors that help determine whether a marriage will last and be happy. For what it’s worth, here is the authors’ formula for a successful marriage:
… couples are most likely to enjoy a long-term marriage that comes close to approximating the soulmate model when they build their marriage on a firm institutional foundation that encompasses, among other things, a normative commitment to marital permanency, friends and family who support their marriage, and a religious community that lends transcendent power to their wedding vows.
Now just keep all that going until you die. Easy.
(The paper, “Is love a flimsy foundation? Soulmate versus institutional models of marriage,” is published in Social Science Research. The authors are W. Bradford Wilcox and Jeffrey Dew.)
