by Jeffrey Dew, Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) and Jason S. Carroll (@DrJasonCarroll)
What attitudes and behaviors lead to a happier and stronger marriage? A new report from the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute provides an answer to that question as we head into National Marriage Week (Feb. 7 to 14).
The new IFS/Wheatley report, For Better: Four Proven Ways to a Strong and Stable Marriage, used data from the 2022 State of Our Unions Survey (SOU22) to identify leading predictors of marital quality. The SOU22 was collected by the survey research firm YouGov in September 2022 and contains responses from 2,000 married men and women in the United States between the ages of 18–55.
Our analysis identified four factors that are strong predictors of both happiness and stability in marriage for both men and women. Importantly, the strongest predictors of feeling that one’s marriage is “highly unlikely” to end in divorce were the same predictors of being “very happy” in marriage.
