Marriages get better after the children grow up and move out, according to a University of California Berkeley study that analyzed the marital satisfaction of more than 100 women over 18 years.
The study, by UC Berkeley’s department of psychology and Institute of Personality &Social Research, questioned the women at the average ages of 43 in 1981, 52 in 1989 and 61 in 1998 and found that marriages grew increasingly better after the kids packed up and left.
“We found that marital satisfaction increased as the women transitioned to an empty nest,” said Sara Gorchoff, one of the authors of the study. “It was not that they spent more time with their partners but that they were better enjoying the time they spent with their partners.”
Though the women in the study were not named, other mothers shared similar views.
Terry Toczynski, a 55-year-old mother of three, said she noticed an improvement in her marriage when her three children went off to school. They were gone for about a year before one of them temporarily moved back recently.
“In the time they weren’t there, we didn’t have to focus 100 percent on raising children, and it was definitely better for us,” the Berkeley woman said. “We were a couple again, two individuals who chose to live together and be with each other.
“At first, it is very quiet, but there is a lot of good in the lack of noise. We got good at having conversations. Our time is about us.”
The 123 women in the study were born between 1937 and 1939 and were first questioned for a study while they were seniors at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. Since then, they have participated in numerous studies.
Some changed partners, some didn’t. Whatever the case, the study showed that they all reported becoming more satisfied when their children moved away from home.
“The increase was not at all dependent on whether they remarried,” Gorchoff said. “And the women did not report that the general global satisfaction with their lives got better, just their marriages. They were enjoying the time with their partners more.”
The first survey was done when most of the women still had children at home, the second when some of them still had kids at home, and the third when most kids were gone. All were in middle age during the first survey. Some got married, some raised kids, some were divorced, some remarried and some were in domestic partnerships.
The study, titled “Contextualizing Change in Marital Satisfaction During Middle Age,” was published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science.
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