RATING MARRIAGES
How did we know who was happily married and who wasn’t? The short answer is: the men told us, repeatedly. Cynics may wonder how many of them were Pollyannas like Boatwright, or possibly even outright liars. But we had decades of prospective follow-up in our files; there was plenty of objective information against which to test their subjective reports. I don’t contend that men in the Study never lied to us or to themselves about their marriages, but it is hard to maintain deception for fifty years and more.
Where did our information come from? Qualitative responses to questionnaires and interviews were a major source. The men’s wives were sent questionnaires, too. Most couples were interviewed together at about age thirty. After that there were no planned couple interviews (although there were some adventitious ones) until Study director Robert Waldinger began interviewing the surviving men and their wives together and separately on videotape. The recordings—another forward-looking investment—are being saved for future study.2 In scoring responses, we always used multiple independent raters, each blind to all other information about the men. That way we avoided the halo effects that can plague longitudinal studies, where raters’ assessments are contaminated by what they know about successes or failures in the past.
A second source was multiple-choice questions. To quantify elusive intuitions about marital satisfaction, we asked husbands to complete a simple multiple-choice scale on five questionnaires between their thirty-fifth and seventieth years. Wives did the same three times, between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five. The four questions whose answers correlated most highly with marital satisfaction were:3
1. Solutions to disagreements generally come: 1=easily, 2= moderately hard, 3=always difficult, 4=we go on without a solution
2. How stable do you think your marriage is? 1=quite stable, 2=some minor weaknesses, 3=moderate weaknesses, 4=major weaknesses, 5 =not stable
3. Sexual adjustment is, on the whole: 1=very satisfying, 2=satisfying, 3 =at times not as good as wished, 4=rather poor
4. Separation or divorce has been considered: 1=never, 2=only casually, 3 =seriously
The scores on these four questions were summed into a global assessment of marital adjustment: the lower the score, the happier the marriage.
The men’s own subjective ratings were a third source of data; three times between the ages of seventy and ninety they rated their marriages on a scale of 1 (very unhappy) to 6 (very happy).
At about sixty, the husbands and wives filled out a chart in which they retrospectively rated their marriages in five-year chunks as: 1=Very enjoyable, 2=Not one of the very best periods, 3=Rocky, 4=Divorce considered.
Our final way of assessing the Study marriages was to look for comments the men made about them outside of specifically marriage-related contexts. This allowed us to test yet again the reliability of their multiple-choice statements. Here are some spontaneous comments made by men who scored their marriages poorly:
“She has an inferiority complex.”
“I am more affectionate than her.”
“She likes her beer.”
“It’s easier to suffer with her than without her.”
“We sleep in separate rooms.”
“When she throws the plates, I catch them. I never throw them back. When she hits me, I never hit her back.” (This man added, however, “Although I’ve slapped her to bring her to her senses”—a good example of a fifty-plus-year marriage that was scored as chronically unhappy.)
The following quotes were characteristic of happy marriages:
“My wife is the kindest and most considerate person I have ever known.”
“Our marriage is completely challenging, completely exciting.”
“Tennis doubles with my wife is my greatest enjoyment.”
“I am very proud of her.”
“I love and admire her; she is my best friend.”
“Our marriage is GREAT. My wife has been the best thing that ever happened to me.”
A dichotomy between good and bad marriages may be hard to establish when feelings are looked at moment to moment, but it is real enough over time.
There were two areas in which our data were weak. The men were loath to return questionnaires that inquired too specifically into their sex lives. Too much curiosity on our part was firmly ignored, and we had to settle for global generalizations. More on this in a bit. Also, the worse the marriage, the less information was forthcoming about it from either husband or wife, which limits my capacity to illustrate a very troubled marriage in a life study. Agatha Penn, for instance, declined to return any of the questionnaires sent to her, or otherwise participate in Study contacts. She also discouraged her husband from responding to inquiries sent to him.
A THIRTY-YEAR CHALLENGE
In 1977 I handed in the manuscript of Adaptation to Life. My editor at Little, Brown, Lewellen Howland, took issue with my contention that divorce was a serious indicator of poor mental health, and suggested gently, “George, it is not that divorce is bad; it is that loving people for a long time is good.” I liked his sentiment, but I didn’t believe him, despite the fact that I myself was in a happy second marriage at age forty. (We’re all the exceptions to our own rules.) The numbers I’d been working with for the previous ten years didn’t look promising at all. By 1967, seventeen men had divorced. By 1973, fourteen of them had been remarried for longer than a year. Of those fourteen second marriages, eight had already ended in divorce again—you’ll hear about two of those in a little while—and four more showed weaknesses that kept them securely out of the good marriage category. In other words, of the fourteen remarriages, only two looked to be anything like happy, and they were still too new to be trusted. Louie’s a romantic, I thought. All I have to do is wait for thirty years and I’ll be able to show him his error.
Fifteen years later I was still right and Howland was still wrong. When I checked marital history against the best and worst Adult Adjustment Outcome determinations that I had established for that 1977 book, all of the fifty-five Best Outcomes had gotten married relatively early and stayed married for most of their adult lives. (And by the time those men were eighty-five, we learned later, only one marriage had ended in divorce.) In contrast, among the seventy-eight Worst Outcomes, five had never married, and by seventy-five years of age, thirty-five (45 percent) of the marriages had ended in divorce. Proportionately three times as many of the Best Adjusted men enjoyed lifelong happy marriages as the Worst Adjusted.
But as the first decade of the twenty-first century wound to a close, the men were well into their eighties and the Study was still going strong. And so were a bunch of second marriages. I could no longer get away with my flippant dismissal of Louie’s rebuke. I was also intrigued by a growing sense that as the men got older they talked about their marriages differently. So in 2010, after many years of concentrating mostly on aging, I took another look at marriage. This time I was armed with a great deal of information about alcohol use among the men and their wives (which I’ll detail in Chapter 9). And it turned out that Lewellen Howland was a very wise man.
Once again, the long picture was quite different from the shorterterm one. Not about everything. At eighty-five, twenty-six of the twenty-eight men with consistently happy first marriages reported that their marriages remained happy. Marriages that had been poor to start with tended to remain that way, whether they endured without divorce for fifty years or ended, still unhappy, in death. Of the thirty surviving men who had had unhappy marriages between twenty and eighty years of age, only five reported happy marriages after eighty. Four of these were new marriages, undertaken after the first wife had died. None of this was very startling (with the exception of the fifth husband’s mysterious report that he and his wife were “still in love, mutually dependent and the best of friends”). But it was very startling, to me at least, that twenty-three of the twenty-seven surviving divorced and remarried men reported that their current marriages were happy—and
had been for an average length of thirty-three years!
What magic had occurred in those final years to shed such a different light on the early statistics? None. It was just that a new calculation had cleared away a lot of obscuring underbrush. On second thought, though, maybe it was magic after all—the magic of lifetime study.
That calculation showed that the single most important factor in the Grant Study divorces was alcoholism; thirty-four of the divorces—57 percent—had occurred when at least one spouse was abusing alcohol. I didn’t uncover this fact until I included the wives’ alcohol use in my marital calculations, and that information had been a very long time in the gathering. The men were much less forthcoming about their wives’ drinking habits than their own. Statistics trickled in slowly, and as they did I had been sequestering them on yellow-lined paper in a folder all their own. One problem with the huge volume of longitudinal data is that it can drown even a computer if you dump everything in at once. So I didn’t enter the wives’ drinking data until they reached critical mass. The minute I did, however, alcohol leaped out at me as a new and extremely important consideration.
When I made my categorical 1977 statement on divorce, the data had suggested that marriages fail due to immaturity of coping mechanisms, poor relationship skills, and evidence of mental illness. Divorce itself, it appeared, was evidence of poor mental health that would surely make itself felt again in future attempts at marriage.4 (Here as always I’m using our standard rough gauges of mental health problems—immature coping style, abuse of alcohol, heavy recourse to psychotherapy or other psychiatric care, use of antidepressants and tranquilizers, and so on.) There were very powerful associations between all of these and divorce. But as always, association and causation are not the same thing. In 2010, when I controlled for alcoholism for the first time, the three alleged 1977 causes of bad marriage ceased to be significant. In fact, it looked very much as though alcoholism in a marriage often caused not only the divorce, but also the failed relationships, the poor coping style, and the evidence of shaky mental health. Yet alcoholism does not even appear in the index of two landmark 500-plus-page books on marriage, Lewis Terman’s 1938 Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness and John Gottman’s 1994 What Predicts Divorce? 5 These works, separated by more than fifty years, are important exemplars of how influential researchers think about marriage, one from the time of the Study’s inception, and the other from the days of its maturity. Alcoholism is still, arguably, the most ignored causal factor in modern social science, and it took the Grant Study sixty-eight years to notice that it was the most important cause of failed marriage.6
So it was back to the drawing board for me. In 1977 I had viewed divorce as a failure in the capacity for intimacy. But by 2010 I knew (and will demonstrate in Chapter 9) that alcoholism is not “a good man’s failing,” but a chronic and relapsing disease; not a matter of personality, but very often of genes.
Once it is clear that divorce sometimes (indeed, frequently) reflects factors other than the partners’ emotional immaturity, it is easier to understand that is not necessarily a predictor of future troubled relationships, and that previously divorced men are capable of long and happy marriages after all.
These findings raise some interesting issues, which will undoubtedly be tested once the necessary lifetime studies are available. From my point of view, however, the take-home lesson is the great power of the Grant Study’s unique approach to diagnosing alcoholism over time by means of behavioral longitudinal data. You can’t measure obesity by asking someone how much he ate last week; people with weight problems are often on diets. You have to get them on a scale. The Study didn’t try to make quantitative estimates of how much or how often the men drank. But as time passed, repeated questions about what problems the men had with their drinking made abuse of alcohol ever more clear.
The wives’ issues with alcohol, as I’ve said, were trickier; a gentleman doesn’t reveal his wife’s weight, and apparently he doesn’t say much about her drinking, either. And we had no direct behavioral information from the wives themselves. So it took a long time for this dramatic correlation to come into focus. But once we did, it was very clear that alcohol is the 800-pound gorilla in any study of marital failure. I will mention it in passing here when it comes up, but Chapter 9 is devoted to an extensive study of alcohol abuse and its hugely destructive effects on individual and interpersonal development.
These two related findings (the implication of alcohol and the exculpation of divorce) point up yet again the crucial importance of long-term follow-up in any research where the passage of time is at issue. As far back as 1951 researchers had begun to acknowledge that their studies of marriage were limited by the cross-sectional nature of the available data, and had sent out a call for longitudinal investigations. But as we’ve seen repeatedly, prospective material seldom comes easily, and it never comes fast. Field and Wieshaus pointed out that “[u]ntil recently marriages that endured 20 years or longer have been considered long-term. . . . It is very likely that a marriage of 40 years differs considerably from the same marriage at 20 years.”7 That comment encapsulates perfectly the truncated expectations of so much psychological and sociological research, and why, when a long perspective on marriage does become available, it is too valuable to neglect. The Grant Study’s perspective is long enough to show us that at sixty years a marriage can turn into a partnership different from what had been twenty years before, for better or for worse; Leo Tolstoy’s story is a notable example of a great marriage that turned sour after many decades and thirteen children.8
THREE MARRIAGES
Now let me try to make these intangibles tangible. I’ll use case histories, commentary from independent observers, and long-term follow-up to illustrate a very happy and lasting marriage, a very happy and lasting remarriage, and a long marriage that endured in the absence of either conflict or tenderness.
Fredrick and Catherine Chipp: Even the mosquitoes. Of the hundreds of responses we got when the Grant Study sent questionnaires out to the men’s children in 1986, there was only one family in which all the children checked off that their parents’ marriage was “[b]etter than my friends,’” That marriage was Fredrick and Catherine Chipp’s. One daughter even scribbled in, “Much better.”
By the time Fredrick Chipp was eighty, he (and his wife) had been giving their marriage rave reviews for six decades. The first time he met Catherine, the sixteen-year-old Chipp went home and told his mother, “I met the girl I’m going to marry.” It took him a few years to get her to see it that way, but from then on, he says, “I’ve lived happily ever after.” Not that there weren’t changes along the way. When he was seventy-five, Chipp described in an interview how their relationship has evolved. “She has become more confident, and I have learned to adjust to that.”
On their fiftieth wedding anniversary, he dug out the diary of his teenage years, in which he had described his future wife as “simply swell.” The two of them started out sailing together. The day after our interview, sixty years later, they were planning to take off on vacation—two weeks of sailing. “I do the skilled and the nautical parts. I take charge—it’s just instinct,” Chipp said. Catherine enjoyed the aesthetics. Every year for decades they went canoeing together in Nova Scotia, too. Chipp told me solemnly, “That is important time.” I’ve had readers complain that marriage isn’t all vacation, and that stories like this don’t tell us much about what the Chipps’ life together was like. My answer to that is: to the Chipps, all of life was a vacation. They enjoyed every bit of it, including the mosquitoes, as long as they were battling them together. You could feel it when you were with them. (And, as Eben Frost’s story below will remind you, in some marriages even the vacations aren’t idyllic.)
Yet they didn’t live in each other’s pockets. Once Chipp retired (he was a successful schoolteacher and administrator), I asked him what it was like being home so much. He said that he and Catherine led different lives and had different pas
sions. They shared what they shared, but “I do not impinge on her work.” They had supper and breakfast together, but they ate lunch separately. When I asked how they collaborated, he pointed to their lush gardens. Catherine did the planting and harvesting, Fredrick said, and he did the heavy labor. They walked together, three miles a day. They read to each other; the Chipps carried out even the (usually solo) act of reading in relationship. This year they had gone camping in Florida for two weeks; all three children and their families, including eight grandchildren, had come along too.
When I interviewed the Chipps for the first time they were forty-seven, and I was struck by how attractive Mrs. Chipp was. “The lines on her face and her facial expressions were all happy,” I wrote in my notes. It made her unusually pretty. More than that, it was clear that humor, one of the most adaptive coping tools of all, was a great Chipp favorite.
They teased each other constantly. At seventy-five Chipp called his wife into the room to help him retrieve a name. “My mind’s a blank,” he told her. “So what’s new?” said she. It reminded me of an encounter with another Grant Study wife in a warm marriage. I asked the routine Study question about whether divorce had ever been considered. “Divorce, never,” she replied without missing a beat. “Murder, frequently.”
What about serious disagreements, though? I asked Mrs. Chipp how she resolved them. “There’s nothing like losing your temper once in a while,” she said. “It clears the air.” But she said it with great good humor. Her husband had told me separately that he believed in bringing conflict out into the open. They got angry occasionally, yes. But covert hostilities had no place in their relationship, while passive aggression is the coping technique most associated with bad marriages. The conflict-avoidant Penns, in contrast, just endured their mutual despair.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Page 20