It's the Little Disagreements That Tear a Marriage Apart

These less happy folks are older, have kids, have been together longer, and it turns out that the compromising they were probably doing early on has worn off in favor of life with this other person, who smokes when they don’t, or vice versa, or who loves going out when they love staying in, who has had to endure health issues from lifestyle or the general effects of aging.

All this stuff, Battersby writes, adds up to the small “niggling things” that stress out your relationship and can lead to separation. Among them: poor mental health, age differences, and religious values. While arguably these are not such small things, I think they are in terms of how they manifest in the day to day. Poor mental health is an exasperating framework to deal with for the depressed person and the non-depressed person and can create distance, misunderstanding, a sense of hopelessness that pervades the everyday. Someone who never gets your ‘80s Rob Lowe jokes is a real buzzkill, and atheists probably aren’t going to find your whole give-it-up-to-God attitude so helpful in a real crisis.

But most relationships tend to start in less clear-cut ways—people meet, are attracted to each other, have good chemistry, enjoy each other’s company. Most of us are not quizzing each other on religious views right off the bat, and age differences can seem like nothing at first, but become more significant over time, particularly as people change. Over the long haul, these differences that once seemed minimal or manageable can suddenly make all the difference in relationship happiness in the everyday.

Battersby adds:

Other factors contributing towards divorce among married couples include: having children; age gaps of more than five years, particularly when the wife is older; financial troubles; one partner smoking; and the wife having a higher level of education. For de facto couples, issues leading to separation include: one person having stronger religious views than the other; large age gaps; and having children.

There is. notably, one big fuckup that can wreck any joint. Battersby notes that “A marriage is six times more likely to break down if a husband beats his wife, according to the survey results.” Can I just say that I would fucking hope that it would end the marriage? As opposed to say, keeping it going on account of how much the partners both love staying in most nights or not smoking cigarettes? I suppose you could view this statistic as good news, in the sense that by not hitting your wife you still have a decent shot at happiness, but that’s bleak even for me.

Even when a woman is not the victim of domestic violence, she is still less likely to be happy than her husband in the marriage. This is not news. Previous research has found that men’s health and emotional wellbeing improves with marriage over being single, whereas women’s flatlines into eternal dissatisfaction which culminates in unhappy death. And the reasons for this are obvious: Women in most hetero marriages are doing all the work—the housework, the scheduling work, the community work, the emotional work, the work work. And those are the “equal” ones.

Battersby:

The survey also found that when couples had different levels of agreeableness, the woman’s satisfaction increases as she becomes more disagreeable, while the man’s satisfaction decreases. Sounds like demanding women enjoy their relationships more. But women become less happy as emotional stability decreases, but it does not seem to bother men.

Weird.

But all things being equal (even though we know they aren’t), this is why most marriage advice tends to focus on the little things, the small ways people can make sure they remain connected rather than driven apart. If they align, the result is a sense of positive autopilot. All relationships take work—sometime enormous amounts of it. But though the effort may be constant, the default should be a feeling that the relationship can run on its own for extended periods of time with good feeling, trust, and contentment—even if, in retrospect, those periods will be far more frequent in the early years, when you tend to be healthy and childless, and life is generally easier.

Of course, knowing any of this is unlikely to help you in a relationship. Happiness is hard to forecast; dissatisfaction disguises itself when you’re working through it. Both are always understood best in hindsight. But not smoking is probably a good a start as any.

Image via Cinematograph AB