“Marriages that start out with less ‘Hollywood romance’ usually have more promising futures.”
Ah, the early days.
When you’re seeing someone new and it’s going well, you might start to think about how things might go wrong (because we’re all only human) – but divorce is probably the last thing on your mind.
However, it could be that the signs that a future marriage will end badly are visible at the very beginning of a relationship.
Research has shown that the more affectionate a couple are towards one another when they start seeing one another, the more likely they will be to divorce later on.
The study followed 168 couples over 13 years and monitored whether their marriages went the distance.
“As newlyweds, the couples who divorced after seven or more years were almost giddily affectionate (in the beginning), displaying about one-third more affection than did spouses who were later happily married,” the researchers wrote in the study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
It can be that that early level of infatuation can burn away, revealing that a pair might not be well-suited or maybe that the level of affection the couple expects from one another is simply impossible to keep up.
“Couples whose marriages begin in romantic bliss are particularly divorce-prone because such intensity is too hard to maintain,” wrote former Psychology Today editor Aviva Patz .
“Believe it or not, marriages that start out with less ‘Hollywood romance’ usually have more promising futures.”
