Positive Illusions

Next to Fig Newtons, there’s nothing I like better than a good longitudinal study. I especially enjoy ones with fancy titles that use lots of charts and graphs to tell us what we suspected all along. The latest, entitled “The Nature and Predictors of the Trajectory of Change in Marital Quality for Husbands and Wives over the First 10 Years of Marriage,” was published this month in the Journal of Developmental Psychology. Cutely subtitled “Predicting the Seven-Year Itch,” this extensive research charts the decline in the quality of marriages of more than 500 Midwestern couples, surveyed over 10 years.

According to the research, married couples’ assessment of the quality of their marriage starts to sink rapidly just after the “I do” and continues downward through the first four years. The quality of marriage plateaus after that first dip and then declines again during years eight, nine and 10–the “seven-year itch” part. Couples reported that the presence of children is, not surprisingly, a considerable stress on a marriage; the research states that having children at home prevented married couples from maintaining “positive illusions about their relationships.”

My local bookstore has a shelf of relationship books that is longer than most relationships, detailing how to find the love you want, how to get married and how to create, and try to maintain, those “positive illusions.” In our popular culture, marriage seems to flow naturally from romance–Julia Roberts keeps running off with Richard Gere. Americans love to get married, but half our marriages don’t take. Then we switch partners and remarry, with roughly the same odds of success.

Natalie Low, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and instructor at Harvard, counsels families as they navigate their way through the illusions and into the reality of marriage. She says the couples she sees are trying to nurture their relationships along with raising perfect kids and maintaining careers, but in this compartmentalized era, they are without the benefit of support systems of extended families and communities. Couples also expect to be happy. But “the facts of life are very grinding, so the reality of marriage is grinding,” says Low, who has been married for 51 years. Marriage is now, as it has always been, hard work. Marriage is not a static event that can be measured, but a series of developments–those triumphs and setbacks–that make up life. “There is no obvious course to follow, so couples just have to keep working. A person sees dramatic changes during a marriage,” Low says, “so a couple has to be committed to a way of life.”

Lawrence Kurdek, Ph.D., the Wright State researcher who wrote the seven-year-itch study, said that its grim statistics actually made him hopeful. “Knowing the pattern of marriage relationships might help couples stay together, if they can come up with positive ways to cope with it,” he says. “We have to build into marriage the idea that there will be lots of change.”

When married couples hit the inevitable doldrums, they may want to revisit their Hollywood-fueled expectations about what marriage is and what it will do for them. Then maybe they can chuck their positive illusions and rent a good movie–one where the hero and heroine don’t necessarily live happily-ever-after all the time, but stay together anyway.

For more information about marriage, see our website at time.com/personal You can e-mail Amy at timefamily@aol.com