Love And Marriage: The Important Milestones Of Love And Marriage

Love and Marriage

Frequently, marriage is one of the important milestones of life that most people go through at some point of their lives. However, it is often difficult to sustain a happy marriage full of love and satisfaction. Therefore, some psychologists conducted experiments and surveys to study what factors determine a satisfying marriage. I have reviewed in total five research articles related to marital satisfaction, such that explore the difference between husbands and wives (Kurdek, 2005), variables that affect marital relationship (Reissman, Aron, & Bergen, 1993), and variable that predicts the satisfaction level in the later years of marriage (Tsapelas, Aron, & Orbuch, 2009). Based on the pioneering work of Bernard (1982), scholars

According to Aron & Aron (1986), a solution to this problem is to engage in activities that are exciting and stimulating because they provide new experiences. In the study by Aron & Henkemeyer (1995), the researchers examined the relation between marital satisfaction and passionate love. A passionate love, to define, is ‘a state of intense longing for one another.’ Defining this term and giving a distinction is very important, since passionate love appears to overlap in meaning quite substantially with relationship satisfaction (Aron & Henkemeyer). Their study in the link between passionate love and marital satisfaction in marriage extended previous research by first, using the most widely used measures of both marital satisfaction and passionate love; second, including a relevant measure of social desirability; third, including measures of diverse set of variables (Aron & Henkemeyer). The results of these research articles are taken into account as background knowledge for the current study. This study was designed to examine the hypothesis of whether boredom in a relationship affects or predicts the satisfaction in the later stage

In case of the dating couples, the factors were more focused on abstract elements of a romantic relationship such as honesty, intimacy, and attachment. On the other hand, the married couples considered more real-life related factors important, such as hobby, finance, family, and religion. This contrast in the perception of factors that build a relationship reflects that marriage is a lot more ‘real’ than a mere dating relationship, in which we tend to try fulfill the romantic and sentimental elements in life we dream of. In parallel, this type of difference is also found within a marriage, between husband and wife (Aron & Henkemeyer). In their study, they found out that women’s correlation of passionate love with relationship variables are mostly higher than the corresponding correlations for men. This may be due to the more enculturated quality of women to expect romance as central feature of married life, whereas men may be socialized to expect that romance is extramarital (Aron & Henkemeyer). As such, the married couples that participated in the current study may have transitioned the central features of a relationship from those of love into more real-life oriented ones like money and family. Looking at the relations between ‘feeling boredom’ and ‘satisfaction,’ two couples gave identical responses and two gave the opposite. First, the two couples that gave identical responses were