How Do You Measure the Success of a Marriage?
How do you measure the success of a marriage or other long-term committed relationship? A traditional inclination suggests that the only way a marriage can be considered successful is if one of the participants ends up dead (preferably at a very old age).
Having just celebrated my eighth wedding anniversary, it is becoming clear to me that staying together until one of us expires is not enough. The real goal is to stay emotionally connected and ideally in love.
According to Forbes, in 2021, 1,985,072 marriages occurred. That same year, 689,308 couples got divorced within the 45 U.S. states that report this statistic. The average length of a marriage prior to divorce is eight years. This last statistic is particularly interesting to me since I am currently sitting at that benchmark.
While reading through the different divorce and marriage statistics, I started thinking a lot about quantitative versus qualitative data. Just because a marriage ended doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful and even if a marriage spans past its eighth year doesn’t mean the participants are happy. What then are the data points that measure success?
Here is some of the quantitative data about my marriage that might seem important. We have been together for 11 years, married for eight. During that time, we have moved five times, bought three houses, lost two parents and two grandparents. There have been four collective job changes and the births of two beautiful sons. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, we have been in marriage counseling, on and off, for almost four years.
When I ponder the question of whether my own marriage is successful, the simplest measure might be time. As of November this year, we made it to eight years, passing the average divorce threshold. But I think if there is any number that points to success in my relationship, it is time we have spent in counseling.
At the end of the day, a successful marriage isn’t just long. I believe a successful marriage is one where you do the work and can look back with gratitude on the entirety of the experience, even if there are moments (or years) that you would rather have skipped.
Maybe we should focus less on the length of marriage and more on the quality. Forbes reported that 49% of married couples find themselves in couples counseling at some point during their relationship and that 70% of those couples find it beneficial.
What the article does not address is whether or how long those couples stay together, because maybe that’s not the point. There is no trophy for longest unhappy marriage. If something is broken, it is worth the effort to fix it -- and sometimes, the most successful thing a marriage can do is end.
As for my own marriage, my assessment is pretty simple. We have more good days than bad and continue to choose each other. While we plan to spend the rest of our lives together, we also know that even if that doesn’t happen, we have been successful. We succeeded in building a life together and succeeded in doing the work to try to maintain it.
When it comes to success, maybe how or when the marriage ends is not as important as the quality of the experience and the effort of the participants.