Marriage

A British wedding website conducted a survey of 4,000 couples. On the survey the couples had to indicate the levels of happiness during the different stages of their marriage. From the results researchers pinpointed the happiest day at 2 years, 11 months and 8 days after the marriage. During this time, British couples had the most sex, best social life, vacations and romantic meals. This is also the time when the couples have the longest heart to heart conversations and when wives receive the most compliments.

Here are a few things that the researchers found which led to those happy marriages:

• Spend 24 minutes having a heart to heart a day.
• Allow for 75 minutes of alone time a day.
• Never go to bed with an argument unresolved.
• 5 cuddles a day and say "I Love You." at least once.
• Spend 3 nights a week curled up on the sofa together.
• 4 phone calls / emails / text messages a day.

Jude Law, David Letterman, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the list goes on and on. What do these people have in common? They have had sexual relations with someone when they were already currently suppose to be in a monogamous relationship with someone else. CNN asked an evolutionary biologist and psychiatrist if it still reasonable to expect people to partner and stay monogamous? According to them, yes, but it is not easy. A more realistic model that was suggest may be serial monogamy. This is when someone stays committed to one person for a certain stage of their life. Once that stage is over, both people move on and find another long-term relationship. Since the 70's, others have tried a similar idea, an open marriage (think swingers). You stay married to your partner but you both can still date other people.

The practice of polyamory is also on the rise. Polyamory refers to having multiple romantic relationships with several people, with all involved having full knowledge and approval. Newsweek estimates that there are about 500 thousand polyamorous families in the USA.

All of these types of relationships take hard work to ensure the happiness of all involved but being in a monogamous relationship probably has the biggest payoffs. You don't have the emotional chaos that WILL happen when dealing with multiple people and raising children becomes easier.

For more on the story, read CNN.

It seems that the dating site Shaadi.com is becoming fairly popular with British Asian singles. The Guardian in the UK wrote an article about the dating site and included several success stories and a few not so successful ones. No dating site is perfect and when I see a article written which includes information about what the site may be lacking or has problems with I tend to give it more weight than a story that is all positive.

Shaadi.com now claims 15 million people have signed up for their service since the website launched in 1997. Currently they have 5 million members using the site at any given time which generates about 300 million page views every month and 6,000 new profiles a day. This dating site:

is tailored to the typical criteria of traditional matchmakers, with questions about family values (traditional, moderate or liberal), profession and even complexion.

Shaadi's search engine allows members to be incredibly detailed about the type of person they wish to find or be matched with.

To find out more about this India dating and matrimonial website, read our review of Shaadi.com.

I am glad to see eHarmony responding in their official blog to an article titled "Marriage-Maker Claims Are Tied in Knots " from the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ article examines some of the marriage statistics released by dating sites like eHarmony as well as the methodology used to calculate such statistics. We talked a bit about this topic as well, a couple of weeks ago when the original WSJ article was published (see Story).

The WSJ article didn't look to kindly on the stats released by dating sites, and for the most part I agree with the author. The public does need to know how these statistics are generated. Of all the dating sites mentioned in the WSJ article, "eHarmony stands out as among the more careful ones". This is not exactly a glowing report for eHarmony so, they decided to post a response on their blog.

In the eHarmony blog post they go into further details on how they calculated that their dating site was responsible for 2% of marriages in the United States, from the 12-month period ending March 2007. Most of the information we already knew about from a previously released PDF file titled "eHarmony | Harris Interactive 2007 Marriage Metrics Number of eHarmony Marriages" (see Story), but the post does flush out a few more details. What this blog post does show is, eHarmony is trying to be as open and transparent with their research findings as possible. I think the name "Open Communication" may indeed be a good choice for the official eHarmony blog.

Here is the full eHarmony response to the Wall Street Journal about how they calculate their marriage statistics. For further information about this dating site, read our review of eHarmony.

The Wall Street Journal in an article called "Marriage-Maker Claims Are Tied in Knots" attempts to find out if some of the statistics are true, in regards to the number of marriages a dating site claims to have generated. eHarmony is targeted because of their claim that 236 members get married everyday (see Story). I believe this works out to 2% of the total number of Americans who got married last year met through the site. Match.com is also mentioned due to stats they released recently (and then pulled) that says 12 couples got married or engaged everyday on their dating site (see Story).

The author, Carl, in a way defends the dating sites published stats when he says that:

One obstacle to further research is that newlyweds are hard for researchers to find. So online-dating companies looking to tout their success as matchmaking yentas have sought novel ways to enumerate marriages.

Less than 2 percent of Americans get married every year. To perform a survey and to get an accurate sample size 1.76 million phone calls would need to be made says Dr. Gonzaga of eHarmony. That would be a costly endeavor, so dating sites are forced to find creative ways to come up with some marriage numbers. The closest thing to an election-quality poll Carl could find was a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, which in 2005 reported from a poll of 3,215 adults, that 3 million Americans found a long term relationship (not necessarily marriages) through a dating site.

I heard about a Australian study and paper called "What’s love got to do with it?" today on our local talk radio station. I also see that Markus over at the Paradigm Shift makes reference to it as well.

The data used in the study is from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (HILDA) and the paper will be presented at the 2009 HILDA Survey Research Conference on July 16 and 17 at University of Melbourne.

The study analyses a range of factors including the relationship between personality, gender and occupation. The researchers investigated individual and couple characteristics associated with marital instability and found that characteristics of men and women can have quite different impacts on marital stability.

This Australian paper takes a look at 2,482 married couples for 6 years (from 2001 to 2007) and attempts to identify the factors associated with marital problems.

Here are some of the higher risk factors associated with marital instability:

• One partner smokes, and the other one doesn't (the same rule can be applied to drinking).
• Almost twice as many marriages which had a low household income separated (16%) when compared to families who are financially stable (9%).
• A woman who wants children more than her husband.
• If the age difference is greater than 9 years (the man being older), it doubles your risk of separation.
• Men who married under 25 years of age are twice as likely to divorce.
• 20% of couples who had children (either together or from other relationships) before the marriage, divorced. It is only a 9% separation rate for couples who did not have children before the marriage.

This research paper is an excellent resource for dating site owners in helping to create a more accurate matchmaking system. While the data is out of Australia, their culture is not that much different from ours here in North America. For the most part, all of the popular dating sites have released very little information on how their matchmaking systems work. In part, it is because they want to keep trade secrets but they also worry about negative reviews from peers. I also have a feeling, a fair number of dating sites do not have any independent scientific research to back up their matchmaking algorithms.

Here is a local copy of the full paper.