I saw this on MSN’s Lifestyle website this morning, originally from Discovery Health
The Top 10 Myths of Marriage
By David Popenoe for Discovery Channel
- Marriage benefits men much more than women.
- Having children typically brings a married couple closer together and increases marital happiness.
- The keys to long-term marital success are good luck and romantic love.
- The more educated a woman becomes, the lower her chances of getting married.
- Couples who live together before marriage, and are thus able to test how well suited they are for each other, have more satisfying and longer-lasting marriages than couples who do not.
- People can’t be expected to stay in a marriage for a lifetime as they did in the past because we live so much longer today.
- Marrying puts a woman at greater risk of domestic violence than if she remains single.
- Married people have less satisfying sex lives, and less sex, than single people.
- Cohabitation is just like marriage, but without “the piece of paper.”
- Because of the high divorce rate, which weeds out the unhappy marriages, people who stay married have happier marriages than people did in the past when everyone stuck it out, no matter how bad the marriage.
In each case they tackle the myth with a fairly general couple of sentences. It would be nice to have seen some hard numbers / research / sources cited but I cant complain - at the end of the day the author made sense of things. The one that caught my eye though
5. Myth: Couples who live together before marriage, and are thus able to test how well suited they are for each other, have more satisfying and longer-lasting marriages than couples who do not.Fact: Many studies have found that those who live together before marriage have less satisfying marriages and a considerably higher chance of eventually breaking up. One reason is that people who cohabit may be more skittish of commitment and more likely to call it quits when problems arise. But in addition, the very act of living together may lead to attitudes that make happy marriages more difficult. The findings of one recent study, for example, suggest “there may be less motivation for cohabiting partners to develop their conflict resolution and support skills.” (One important exception: Cohabiting couples who are already planning to marry each other in the near future have just as good a chance at staying together as couples who don’t live together before marriage).