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If you’re looking to get married and stay married, that is. I posted before about what you should look for in a marriage partner. As an addendum to that, guys might want to steer clear of serial cohabiters and women who didn’t have close friends in college:
Using cohort data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this paper tracks the experiences of serial cohabitors. Results indicate that only a minority of cohabiting women (about 15% – 20%) were involved in multiple cohabitations. Serial cohabitations were overrepresented among economically disadvantaged groups, especially those with low income and education. They also were less likely than single-instance cohabiting unions to end in marriage rather than dissolve. If serial cohabitors married, divorce rates were very high — more than twice as high as for women who cohabited only with their eventual husbands. The results suggest the need to balance the government’s current preoccupation with marriage promotion with greater support of “at risk” unions that marriage promotion initiatives have helped create.
Source: “Serial Cohabitation and the Marital Life Course” from Journal of Marriage and Family, Volume 70 Issue 4, Pages 861 – 878
And:
Using an Eriksonian-based measure (E. H. Erikson, 1963), the Inventory of Psychosocial Development (A. Constantinople, 1969), this longitudinal U.S. study explored the extent to which an individual’s potential for intimacy in young adulthood predicted divorce by midlife. Intimacy was defined as the potential to establish close relationships involving high levels of communication, closeness, and commitment. Marital status 34 years after college graduation was obtained from 167 participants (M age = 55.1 years, 60% male, 30% divorced) originally tested in college in 1966–1968 in the United States. Hierarchical logistic regression revealed a significant Gender × Intimacy interaction in predicting marital status at midlife. Women but not men with low intimacy in college had higher risk of divorce in midlife in the sample.
Source: “Intimacy in young adulthood as a predictor of divorce in midlife” from Personal Relationships, Volume 15 Issue 4, Pages 551 – 557
(Cue angry emails from serial cohabiting women and women who were emotionally distant in college.)
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