A recent New York Times article highlights the (perhaps surprising) good news that American marriages appear to be stronger today than they were a few decades ago.  It got me to thinking about what makes marriages last.

My husband and I have a group of friends who all live in different parts of the country, but who stay connected by vacationing together every year.  Years ago we were driving home from our week at the beach with these friends when we went into the usual post-mortem mode.  What was it, I wanted to know, that made this group so precious to us?

We tossed around lots of qualities they possess as individuals and collectively–they’re frightfully smart, uproariously funny, appropriately bookish, love good food and wine–the list went on for miles. (Yes, literally.)  I think somewhere in there I mentioned that it was important to me that I could share my faith with these friends without embarrassment or pretension, and that we don’t all have to agree on everything in order to have fantastically entertaining and passionate conversations.  There are few more delightful experiences in life than sitting  out on the porch with these people and talking into the wee hours of the morning, with topics ranging from the 1982 Hymnal to Bill Clinton to cell biology and round and round we go.

Then one of us noticed another fine quality: all the married people in the group seemed to genuinely like being married and to have easy, affectionate relationships with their spouses.  It occurred to me then, and I feel even more strongly about it now, that married couples can draw strength and sustenance from time spent around other basically happy married couples.  I say “basically happy” because I don’t think perfection is the goal here.  There is something about the enduring relationships I have witnessed that makes them both too real and too idiosyncratic to think of them as models to be replicated.  I guess I’m fundamentally disagreeing with Tolstoy on this: happy families are not all alike, and neither are happy couples.  We’ve just got enough in common to be able to light up a little bit of the path for the next couple to stumble along it.

Perhaps the dynamic is similar to the one reported on in that study that came out a couple of years ago: it suggested that an individual’s pattern of weight gain and loss might well be predicted by the patterns of one or two close friends. It was rather uncharitably summarized as “fat friends make you fat.”  Clearly our subconscious ideas of what looks good or appealing, as well as our behaviors, are powerfully affected by our relationships with our friends.

I haven’t seen anything scientific that directly supports my “good marriages are contagious” philosophy, but I’ll keep looking.  It does remind me of the frisson of recognition I felt the first time I watched the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.  When one of the main characters died, I realized along with the other characters that the only happy couple in that whole big group of friends was the gay couple–the ones who were not, of course, technically or legally married.  But they did possess qualities of fidelity, passion, and companionableness that the others desperately wanted in their own lives, and it was only after their friends came to that realization for themselves that that they were able to stop looking for love in all the wrong places and make meaningful commitments.  It’s only a movie, I know, and problematic in many ways, but I think it was rather prescient.

There’s a lot more in the study, some of it quite challenging to what we might call more traditional views of marriage, but all of it good news to those of us who think that stable marriages benefit society.  Churches and other religious organizations might do well to consider whether their teachings on marriage reflect these new insights, and what it might mean to do so while also always remaining true to the Gospel.

I plan to write more about this soon, but for now urge readers to check out the article linked above and consider that it might be time to stop throwing around that statistic that half of all American marriages end in divorce.  Just not true anymore, if it ever was.

And to our friends at the beach: sorry we couldn’t be there this year.  Hope you’re having a heckuva time.