10 Ways Marriage Changes Your Relationship

In this day and age marriages have less than 50% chance of survival. Since procreation can happen without the act of marriage, there is, strictly speaking, no evolutionary purpose for marriage. Humans, unlike doves and some skinks, are not programmed to mate for life.

Although marriage can bring social and financial advantages, it can also bring total devastation, depending on your situation. The extent to which marriage will change your relationship depends on the following ten factors.

1. Spoken and unspoken rules of your relationship prior to marriage. Who is going to take responsibility for what? What is and isn't going to be tolerated? If you and your marriage partner have not come to an agreement on some major issues prior to your marriage, expect your relationship to sour after marriage.
2. The relative IQ of the marriage partners. After the fog of romance and the wedding has settled you will eventually have to start communicating with each other. If you find this a strain, the marriage will certainly make both of you miserable and destroy your relationship.
3. How much compromise you are both willing to make. Happy marriage involves successfully sharing your personal space with another human being. This requires daily compromise. If one of you is compromising considerably more than the other, resentment will eventually destroy your relationship.
4. Whether you have common goals and values. Working with another person on common goals and achieving them, will certainly improve your relationship. And so with marriage two can achieve more than one.
5. Your reasons for getting married in the first place. A recently divorced friend has remarked that she would only re-marry if that marriage improved the quality of her life. That was quite a revelation as most people I know marry for love or money, or are forced into it by circumstance. If your reason for getting married is to avoid having a child out of wedlock, do you honestly believe that marriage will improve your relationship?
6. Whether you want to have children. Having children generally goes with the marriage territory and has an enormous impact on your relationship. It could bring you closer together if you both want to have children, or tear you apart if only one of you wants to have children.
7. Where (in the world) you live. The messages and images you get from society about marriage enormously affect your relationship. For example, here in Australia the media portrays marriage as something that deteriorates rapidly after the wedding. The word 'wife' becomes something derogatory. It appears common place for partners to stray, to ignore the needs of the other, to revert to 'what's in it for me' mentality and to demand 'me' time. In other parts of the world I've seen marriage portrayed as something that strengthens family and community ties.
8. Your expectations of a married life and whether you've shared your expectations with your partner. If, for example you expect to have more sex, you may be disappointed. The survey conducted by Durex has shown a significant decrease in this department after marriage.*
9. Whether you expect your marriage partner to change (or not) after marriage. Men generally expect women not to change. They want them to stay slim and pretty and interesting forever. Women, on the other hand, expect men to change, to become domesticated, fatherly and grown up. Therefore there must be a total acceptance of the partner, warts and all, prior to marriage, in order for marriage to improve the relationship.
10. The proximity to in-laws. Recently it has been suggested that the further away you are from your in-laws, the longer your marriage will last. I always liken the in-laws to pearls - very valuable (when you need babysitting help or a loan) but at the same time an irritation for their insistence that they know better. With marriage, in-laws can make or break your relationship.

* Durex Survey http://marriage.about.com/cs/sexualstatistics/a/sexstatistics.htm
Saving Your Marriage before It Starts : Seven Questions to Ask Before and After You Marry by Les and Leslie Parrot