Finding out what you don't want is definitely important too. Some people figure that out quickly, some go through a lot of drama before they finally figure it out. And I can certainly see how people who have trouble figuring out what they don't want, may enter a marriage that doesn't work out. But I also think that people who marry with relatively little dating, are more committed to making it work.
My take on your comment.
Accepting the premise of: "you have both credibly committed"(a nice phrase) -> removes reason to be suspicious.
Removing suspicion -> removes fear. Removing fear -> removes anxiety/anger. Less suspicion, fear, anxiety and anger -> Less effort
Hence: "Committing to make it work makes it easier to make it work." (another nice phrase)
On the one hand you are committing to work. Who wants to sign up for more of that!? On the other hand, it really does reduce the overall workload. Long term relationships may be less scary than people realise.
When my wife does something that irritates me, my first question is "What error in communication led to our team play resulting in this?", because I have already accepted she is not doing it from spite.
It is also about selection, but much more about ability to weed out abusive people and selfish people and so on. Of course also compatibility, clean freak will never be happy with messy person.
And those abilities form a lot in childhood, in family and with friends. They are also about your deep seeted values.
A lot of short relationships suggest either lack of interest in long term relationship or inability to form it.
The way hn talks about these issue always strikes me like a bunch of people who think people are machines and kind of don't undestand how people form relationships. Like qualifying a partner that don't fit some checkbox on original list someone was forced to make as "settling down". There is chemistry alias emotional and hormonal side to the whole thing, people.
Edit: Collage education and getting first married at an older age significantly lower the odds of divorce. Which suggests having multiple prior relationships increase the odds of marriage success. However, we don’t have good statistics for this stuff.
Divorce spikes around various life transitions occur because predictable events create predictable stresses that predictably are hard on marriages. Examples include the death of a child, children leaving the home, financial crisis, retirement and long-term illness.
Pairs who proved compatibility by settling down fast last longer because they are more likely to survive these stress points. However stress points are still stress points and "more likely to survive" still means that lots won't.
Personal disclaimer. I married at 20 to my second girlfriend. I was her first boyfriend. We did divorce..but only after 25 years. You can decide for yourself whether a 25 year marriage is evidence that we were more or less stable than an average couple.
I don’t think a relationship that ends is always worse than one that continues. Many stay together out of habit, fear, finances, having kids etc, continue long enough and someone is likely to die. Simply lasting a long time is thus a very poor measure of success. Arguably being happy, raising well adjusted kids, financial success, and or a host of other things could be considered a much better benchmark.
So I will turn it around, what’s the odds you would each have found a better partner or even become a better partner by looking longer?
You can not use statistic thay way. General stat for divorce does translate into individual one like this.
I'm biased. But given her dating history since, I don't know that she would have done better than me.
People often avoid divorce and keep dead marriage because of inertia or fear of change. The massive life trasitions bring on stresses that test all of of that. And things are changing anyway at that point.
Also, if you dated a lot of people who were genuinly unsuitable for long term relationship, issue really is either your selection or what you signal to good prospective partners. Like, abusers pick up certain types and stable guys/gals avoid certain types.
This is not to discount that there are treatments that really do work. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is an excellent example.
This is also not to deny that people who seek therapy on average do better than people who do not. That is clearly true, but it is unclear whether it is explained by "therapy worked" or the selection bias that "people who are demonstrate putting effort into their problems are likely to do better."
But it is a lot easier to make the claim that therapy helps than it is to demonstrate it. And given the combination of the replication crisis and widespread poor use of statistics, it is hard to trust most of the research into mental health treatments.
That said, most people who have been through therapy believe that it helped them. This is not actually evidence of effectiveness. Because that was true even for therapies such a Freudian psychology that are demonstrably ineffective. And even widespread belief in the effectiveness of treatments is not evidence either - as https://psmag.com/social-justice/75-years-alcoholics-anonymo... points out there is remarkably little evidence for 12 step programs for addiction. Despite testimonials and general belief to the contrary.
I'm guessing those marriages are likely correlated with strong shared religious beliefs[1] and closeness to extended families that help share the burden of raising children.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857783/#:~:tex....
Negative selection bias as in people who are less capable to maintain long term relationships are more likely to have a lot of dating history.
Conversely, people who are super easy going and great partners to be with may have very few people break up with them (and kind of succeed on the first try).
Or another way to put it: To have a long dating history with a lot of different partners, you need to have broken up (or been broken up with) quite a few times. This could be due to circumstances outside of your control, but that is probably not true for all people in that category.
People that have dated few people might be more likely to share a similar approach to relationships.
This is not against what OP says, you could have some people who date less people and some who prefer to date a lot. At the end, both of them will probably settle down when they find one they like a lot
What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married.
Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a dating history with a lot of partners "to find out what they don't want". That said, I'm aware of the negative selection bias there.