What Makes a Happier Marriage?

One writer gleaned marriage advice from around the world.

Posted Apr 18, 2017
Wednesday Martin Ph.D.

When she decided to get married, author and journalist Jo Piazza pulled out all
the stops. She researched marriage at home and around the world, interviewing
hundreds of women in 20 countries on five continents about what makes a
happy and successful marriage in the year 2017. Unique and unexpected advice
can be found in her hilarious and hard hitting new book, How to Be Married and
right here in this Q& A with Jo.
Who is getting marriage right, and who is getting it wrong?

Source: Shutterstock
America gets marriage wrong. Its sad to me that we live in a country that likes
to talk a lot about promoting family values and honoring the family, but doesnt
do too much to make sure married couple are actually happy.
Weve seen a major erosion of strong community ties here in the states. Older
generations rarely pass down advice about marriage and partnership to the
younger generations.
During a couples most fragile timehaving a baby and young childrenthere is
zero government support for parental leave or childcare which puts
enormous stress on a marriage.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology followed
218 couples over eight years and found most were less happy with their
marriages after becoming parents. Only 15 percent of fathers and 7 percent of
mothers were more satisfied with their marriage after having a child.
When researchers looked at the happiness levels of parents versus non-parents
in countries with more flexible work options, generous parental leave policies,
and subsidies for daycareparents tended to be happier than non-parents.
The negative effects of parenthood on happiness were entirely explained by the
presence or absence of social policies allowing parents to better combine paid
work with family obligations. And this was true for both mothers and fathers,
wrote Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin
and coauthor of the study.
And we work too damn much. We let our jobs dictate where we live and how we
live instead of putting our marriages first. But many of us have to do this just to
survive.
Marriage is flawed everywhere in the world. Its a complicated institution. But
couples tend to be a lot more satisfied in different countries. Northern Europe is a
great example. Married couples tend to be much happier when they have more
support in the form of social services that just leads to less constant worry about
getting by. They also have less of a stigma attached to divorce. They dont
consider it a failure or something shameful. Theres something to be said about
knowing how to end a marriage gracefully.
You said you wrote this book because you didnt have a good role model for a
happy marriage. Tell me about that.
My parents were married for 40 years and they couldnt stand one another. It
was the kind of marriage where arguments were the norm for communication. I
didnt want that for my own marriage, but I also didnt know how to be in a
marriage. I thought I could report and write my way out of it.
You hadnt even gotten married when you started reporting the book? Why not
wait until after your first year of marriage?
Every marriage therapist and psychologist I talked to told me that the first year
of marriage is the most important. Many of them called it the wet cement year
since it is the time when we set our habits in stone. But most couples just cruise
through that year without thinking about itwithout realizing that they could be
creating patterns for the next 50 years. I wanted to really think about it and be
intentional about it.
Which cultures surprised you the most?
I think I learned the most about monogamy from the polygamist tribes in Kenya
and Tanzania. The first thing I tell people is that polygamy is most of the tribal
cultures has nothing to do with sex. I spoke to so many Maasai wives who told
me that it was their decision to ask for a second wife. It was about a division of
labor. These women do so much work in a day that it will break your heart. They
get to a point where they need a second set of hands. But what I was interested
in was the takeaway for monogamists. We expect our spouse to be our
everything and to do everything and thats absurd. We could all benefit from a
division of labor in a relationship. For examplelet your spouses friends do the
heavy lifting with all of their complaining about work. Let their brother be the
person they go on ski vacations with if you hate skiing.
Which advice will get people mad?
I talk a lot in the first chapter about the idea of submission in a marriage. I went
into this book believing that any form of submission took power away from
women and handed it right on over to men. And the women I spoke to in South
America did their best to convince me the opposite was true.
They consistently told me that mens fragile egos demand a sense of control,
and sometimes a wife needs to let her husband think hes the one calling the
shotseven though shes influencing his behavior and decisions in more subtle
ways.
These women are astute anthropologists of male behavior, and they long ago
learned how to operate within the constraints of a historically patriarchal society.
They chose to behave in certain ways to preserve their self-worth in a system
that was often stacked against them. And maybe submission is the wrong word
to use here. Its more about reading cues and managing egos, regardless
of gender, and there isnt a great word for that. Its more about control.
I also tell young women to wait until after the age of 30 to even think about
marriage. A woman over the age of 30 has a lower chance of her marriage
ending in divorce than a woman who married just a few years earlier between
the ages of 27 and 29.
You set out to write the book to help sort through what comes after I do but,
knowing what you know now, if you could give one piece of marriage advice to
individuals planning on tying the knot, what would it be?
Get rid of your expectations. Too many good relationships suffer because one
spouse has extreme expectations for what theyll get out of a relationship or how
itll look. At one point while reporting this book, I was spending time with women
in a small village on the Brahmaputra River in India, a river that regularly floods
and washes away entire villages. I told them that Americans think marriage is
such hard work. They laughed and laughed. They said we were just silly. Why
couldnt we be grateful for the things we did have? Their entire lives could be
uprooted in a flash flood. They had a better perspective than most of overly
privileged friends and family members.
Whats one thing you can do every day to make a marriage better?
Say "thank you." Scientists at the University of Georgia once surveyed 468
married people and found that gratitude could consistently predict how happy
someone was in their marriage. Even if a couple is experiencing distress and
difficulty in other areas, gratitude in the relationship can help promote positive
marital outcomes, said the studys lead author, Allen Barton, a postdoctoral
research associate at UGAs Center for Family Research.