University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, USA.
Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA.
Fam Process. 2024 Mar;63(1):228-242. doi: 10.1111/famp.12868. Epub 2023 Feb 14.
After the rapid increase of the American divorce rate in the late 20th century, one of the most conspicuous efforts of the marriage movement in the 1990s that was used to increase marital stability was the legislation of the covenant marriage license, a more restricted marriage license issued in three different states of the U.S. To investigate the marital life of newlywed covenant versus standard couples, a large-scale 5-year couple study was conducted between 1998 and 2003 in Louisiana. The present study uses this large-sample, multiple-wave, multiple-group dyadic dataset to examine differences in co-development and divorce rates in 297 covenant and 380 standard mixed-sex couples using a multiple group growth curve modeling and survival analysis. We examined differences in marital trajectories between covenant and standard couples as well as between husbands and wives in each marital group. The results show (1) that the couples in both groups experienced, on average, declines in marital satisfaction, and such a decline was slower in covenant husbands than their wives as well as those in standard marriages, and (2) that co-development in marital satisfaction was more prominent in standard marriages than in covenant marriages, meaning standard couple's marital satisfaction declined at a more similar rate than that of covenant couples. We provide possible explanations and discuss practical implications.
20 世纪末,美国离婚率迅速上升,为了提高婚姻稳定性,20 世纪 90 年代的婚姻运动做出了最显著的努力之一就是制定了婚约婚姻许可证,这是在美国三个不同州颁发的一种更受限制的婚姻许可证。为了调查新婚契约夫妇与标准夫妇的婚姻生活,1998 年至 2003 年,路易斯安那州进行了一项大规模的为期 5 年的新婚夫妇研究。本研究使用这个大样本、多波、多组对偶数据集,使用多组增长曲线建模和生存分析,研究了 297 对契约夫妇和 380 对标准混合性别夫妇的共同发展和离婚率的差异。我们考察了契约夫妇和标准夫妇之间以及每个婚姻群体中丈夫和妻子之间的婚姻轨迹差异。结果表明:(1)两组夫妇的婚姻满意度平均呈下降趋势,契约丈夫的下降速度比妻子和标准婚姻中的下降速度都要慢;(2)婚姻满意度的共同发展在标准婚姻中比在契约婚姻中更为明显,这意味着标准夫妇的婚姻满意度下降速度与契约夫妇的下降速度更为相似。我们提供了可能的解释,并讨论了实际意义。