15 relationship facts everybody should know before getting married

Shana LebowitzFeb 12, 2017, 22:53 IST

Read before you put a ring on it.

If there's a good time to reflect on your relationship and where it's headed, it's Valentine's Day.

We've taken this opportunity to round up scientific research on the specific factors that can make or break a romantic relationship.

Below, we've listed 15 nontrivial things you might want to keep in mind before hiring a wedding planner.

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If you wait until you're 23 to commit, you're less likely to get divorced.

A 2014 University of North Carolina at Greensboro study found that American women who cohabitate or get married at age 18 have a 60% divorce rate, but women who wait until 23 to make either of those commitments have a divorce rate around 30%.

"The longer couples waited to make that first serious commitment [cohabitation or marriage], the better their chances for marital success," The Atlantic reported.

15 relationship facts everybody should know before getting married — The 'in love' phase lasts about a year.

The honeymoon phase doesn't go on forever.

According to a 2005 study by the University of Pavia in Italy, it lasts about a year. After that, levels of a chemical called "nerve growth factor," which is associated with intense romantic feelings, start to fall.

Helen Fisher, a psychologist and relationship expert, told Business Insider that it's unclear when exactly the "in love" feeling starts to fade, but it does so "for good evolutionary reasons," she said, because "it's very metabolically expensive to spend an awful lot of time just focusing on just one person in that high-anxiety state."

Two people can be compatible — or incompatible — on multiple levels.

Back in the 1950s and '60s, Canadian psychologist Eric Berne introduced a three-tiered model for understanding a person's identity. He found that each of us have three "ego states" operating at once:

• The parent: What you've been taught

• The child: What you have felt

• The adult: What you have learned

When you're in a relationship, you relate on each of those levels:

• The parent: Do you have similar values and beliefs about the world?

• The child: Do you have fun together? Can you be spontaneous? Do you think your partner's hot? Do you like to travel together?

• The adult: Does each person think the other is bright? Are you good at solving problems together?

While having symmetry across all three is ideal, people often get together to "balance each other." For instance, one may be nurturing and the other playful.

The closer a couple are in age, the less likely they are to get divorced.

A study of 3,000 Americans who had ever been married found that age discrepancies correlate with friction in marriages.

The Atlantic's Megan Garber reports:

"A one-year discrepancy in a couple's ages, the study found, makes them 3 percent more likely to divorce (when compared to their same-aged counterparts); a 5-year difference, however, makes them 18 percent more likely to split up. And a 10-year difference makes them 39 percent more likely."

Resentment builds quickly in couples who don't tackle chores together.

Over 60% of Americans in one poll said that taking care of chores plays a crucial role in having a successful marriage.

"It's Not You, It's the Dishes" coauthor Paula Szuchman recommends a system where each person specializes in the chores they're best at.

"If you really are better at the dishes than remembering to call the in-laws, then that should be your job," she writes. "It'll take you less time than it'll take him, and it'll take him less time to have a quick chat with mom than it would take you, which means in the end, you've saved quite a bit of collective time."

You'll never get to know your partner perfectly.

After dating someone for a couple of years, you might feel like you know everything about them: what kind of toothpaste they use, which TV series they guiltily binge-watch, which foods nauseate them.

But you probably don't know them quite as well as you think you do.

According to a 1997 study, couples who had been together longer expressed more confidence in how well they knew each other. But as it turns out, relationship length wasn't related to accuracy.

Even when participants had to guess how their partners would rate themselves on intelligence, athleticism, and attractiveness, they were only right about 30% of the time.

If you're economically dependent on your spouse, you're more likely to cheat on them.

Contrary to popular belief, cheating isn't necessarily more common among high-earning couples. The link between income and infidelity is more nuanced than that.

Recent research from the University of Connecticut suggests that a person who is economically dependent on their spouse is more likely to be unfaithful — and that's especially true for a man who relies financially on a woman.

Interestingly, when women are the breadwinners, they're less likely to cheat. When men are the breadwinners, they're more likely to cheat.

Couples who appreciate each other are more likely to stay together.

As Business Insider's Erin Brodwin reported, gratitude may be a key to lasting relationships.

In one University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study, researchers had participants keep private daily diaries in which they recorded things their partner had done for them and how it had made them feel. As it turns out, couples who were more grateful toward each other felt that the relationship was stronger.

Meanwhile, another series of studies, led by a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, found that more grateful couples were more likely to still be together nine months later.

When it comes to sex, quality is more important than quantity.

Business Insider's Jessica Orwig reported on a fascinating Carnegie Mellon study on the link between how often you have sex with your partner and how happy you are.

Researchers split a bunch of heterosexual, married couples into two groups: For 90 days, half continued with their normal sex schedule and half had sex twice as often. When the researchers measured how each group felt at the end of the experiment, the group that had doubled their sex frequency was in fact slightly less happy.

As the lead researcher behind the study told The New York Times, if you want to be happy, focus on quality over quantity.

This is an update of an article originally posted by Drake Baer.