The stressful pace of modern life has little impact on the success or failure of marriage, although people are now more likely to walk away from an unhappy marriage, research published yesterday finds.
The research, Distressed Relationships: Does Counselling Help?, also found men were less distressed by an unhappy marriage than women. It was carried out on behalf of the Marriage and Relationship Counselling Services (MRCS), with the support of the Government's Family Support Agency.
The report, based on questionnaires with couples attending MRCS, comes in the context of increasing marriage and relationship breakdown, which grew significantly between 1996 and 2002. The proportion of separated or divorced people was 7.5 per cent of all ever-married people in 2002, compared with 5.4 per cent in 1996.
The study found four factors contributed substantially to unhappiness in marriage: a spouse's negative behaviour - not wanting to listen, excess criticism and avoiding conflict; dissatisfaction with partner's task-sharing in the home, particularly housework and childcare; financial situation; and women's excessive drinking and men's stress.
The author of the report, social and economic research consultant Mr Kieran McKeown, said external factors - such as the pressures of commuting, long working hours, childcare problems - had "very little if any impact" on the happiness or not of a marriage.
"This is surprising and a bit of a challenge to the way we talk about marriage distress. What has changed [in the past decade] is that people's expectations of relationships have changed. Also it is now more possible and permissible to leave an unhappy marriage in a way that it was not before."
Asked whether he thought people's expectations of marriage were too high, he said he would prefer to say "sometimes unrealistic".
He said having unrealistic expectations was OK as long as someone was willing to undergo the readjustment. "Disappointment can be the gateway to wisdom," he said.
As long as both in the relationship shared a deep caring for each other, "that seems to transcend other particularities".
As the most important factors in unhappiness were a partner's negative behaviours and styles of conflict resolution, these were susceptible to the intervention of counselling, he said.
More women than men initiated counselling.
Women gave more importance to goals such as finding ways of coping (92 per cent) and feeling less troubled (87 per cent), while men stressed goals such as improving (90 per cent) and preserving (79 per cent) the relationship.
The study finds unhappy relationships and marriages do benefit from counselling in nine out of 10 cases. It points out that "the act of seeking help has the effect of restoring hope and mobilising people's natural capacity to solve their problems".
