The challenges of marital life: Factors of marital life decline

A human is a social being, who wants to achieve relations with other people. The most common form of close emotional relationships in adulthood is marriage. A married relationship can be implied in various ways and, although marriage lasts as a constant form of emotional attachment, contemporary marriage is in crisis. Actual social circumstances place various challenges before married life. In this work we have focused on some aspects which we recognized as potential factors of marriage destabilization. These include various empirical researches both in Serbia and abroad: the role of age in marriage, cohabitation, importance of primary family, children, economic stress, mechanisms of coping with stress, affective attachments between partners, solving conflicts, communication competence, distribution of house chores. Those are the factors that experts face in counseling and therapy works, solving marriage crisis. We see the quality of a married relationship as a multidimensional phenomena consisting of marriage satisfaction, marriage stability, marriage cohesion, marriage compliance. In this paper, we tried to show the complexity of marriage relationships in a nutshell and present the current research directions in this area of psychology.

RAZLIKE U PROCENI ZADOVOLJSTVA ŽIVOTOM IZMEĐU OSOBA KOJE IMAJU I KOJE NEMAJU ČLANA PORODICE KOME JE POTREBA POSEBNA NEGA

Estimation of life satisfaction is an important indicator of mental health. In families where one member needs intensive care and attention, many mental health parameters start to decline, even life satisfaction. In line with that, we conducted research with a goal to explore the role of marriage quality, job satisfaction, altruism, age, education, and gender in life satisfaction in individuals that have a family member in need of intensive care or additional support (N=98) and individuals that who do not have (N=793). The instruments used were the DAS scale, a combination of the Altruism scale and Alzam scale. Life satisfaction and job satisfaction were evaluated on 10-point scale. All participants were married or in a romantic relationship at the time of research. It showed that there is a significant difference in life satisfaction between these two groups of individuals – a lower level of life satisfaction was identified in a group of individuals that has a family member in need of intensive care. Important predictors of life satisfaction in the first group of individuals were job satisfaction and risks for marriage stability, and in the second job satisfaction, partner agreement and age. Life satisfaction is higher among people who have a university degree and/ or higher education than those who have completed high school in both groups. In both groups, job satisfaction represents an important predictor of life satisfaction. Still, we noticed differences when it comes to the quality of marriage – risks of marriage stability decrease life satisfaction in a group that has a family member in need of intensive care, whereas agreement with partner contributes to life satisfaction in the second group of participants.

It Sucks to Be Single! Marital Status and Redistribution of Social Security*

In this article, we study the labour supply effects and the redistributional consequences of the US social security system. We focus particularly on auxiliary benefits, where eligibility is linked to marital status. To this end, we develop a dynamic, structural life cycle model of singles and couples, featuring uncertain marital status and survival. We account for the socio-economic gradients to both marriage stability and life expectancy. We find that auxiliary benefits have a large depressing effect on married women’s employment. Moreover, we show that a revenue neutral minimum benefit scheme would moderately reduce inequality relative to the current US system.

Marriage stability in a pastoralist society

We examined how individual investment was associated with the duration of marriage partnerships in a pastoralist society of Amdo Tibetans in China. We collected demographic and socioeconomic data from 420 women and 369 men over five villages to assess which factors predicted partnership length. We found that the payment of dowry and bridewealth from both sides of the family predicted marriage stability. The production of offspring, regardless of their survivorship, also had a positive effect on marriage duration, as did trial marriage, a time period before formal marriage. Finally, we found that if both bride and groom invest resources initially into a partnership—whether wealth or labor—their subsequent partnership is stronger than couples who do not make such investments. This paper adds to our understanding of complex social institutions like marriage from a behavioral ecological perspective.

Impact of the divorce experience on the marital and family mindsets

The article presents a comparative analysis of marital and family mindsets of two categories of the demographically active population of modern Russia: (1) individuals that have no experience of a divorce and (2) those who have already experienced one or more official termination of a marriage. The empirical base of the analysis is the data of the author’s questionnaire survey conducted by representative sampling in Volgograd and Volgograd Region in 2015–2016. The analysis was made on the following basic empiric indicators: optimal (from the viewpoint of the respondents) age for the first marriage, frequency of mentioning marital and family statuses as the respondents describe their own social and demographic “portrait”, legitimate causes of a divorce and a number of others. It is found that, in the case of sufficiently strong traditional marital and family mindsets, perception of marital norms is adjusted, if an “abnormal” event (such as a divorce) occurs in the individual’s life course. At the same time, perception of the marriage stability is less variable and does not depend on the social and demographic characteristics of the respondents, including the presence/absence of a marriage termination experience. The “strongest” factor that affects the change of the marital and family mindsets is age. With age (and, consequently, experience accumulation), importance of the majority of main factors capable of preventing the individual from a divorce decreases and, therefore, the risk of such event increases.

Determinants of Marriage Stability among Married Couples in North-Central Nigeria Implication for Counselling

<em><em>The study investigated determinants of marriage stability among married couples in North Central Nigeria. In order to carry out this study, four hypotheses were formulated. An instrument known as “Determinants of Marriage Stability Questionnair (DOMSQ)” was constructed by the researcher and used to collect information from the field. The instrument had content and facial validity and its reliability coefficient is 0.87. The investigator used eight research assistants to administer nine hundred and ninety copies of the questionnaire on the respondents in Kogi and Benue States. Nine hundred and eighty three copies were retrieved from the respondents indicating 99.3 percent return rate. The researcher collated the information got from the field work and the Z statistics was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings showed that, there was no significant difference between male and female married couples in their identification of childlessness as determinant of marriage stability, there was no significant difference between married couples in the urban and rural areas in their identification of sexual satisfaction as determinant of marriage stability, there was no significant difference between old and young married couples in their identification of cultural background as determinant of marriage stability, there was no significant difference between married couples from Kogi and Benue States in their identification of communication as determinant of marriage stability. One of the recommendations is that couples who are faced with the problem of childlessness should seek medical assistance and also be positive about such outcome.</em></em>