What's love got to do with it? Marital satisfiction

This is a small assignment for my Marriage and Family class.  We were assigned to respond to Wilcox and Nock (2006), a very interesting study on marital satisfaction.

Andrew Marvell famously sang, "But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near." I will not analyze, as I would like, the interesting and encouraging aspects of this article, nor the several errors in logic (Wilcox & Nock, 2006), nor will I enter into a detailed consideration of what marriage should be or could be; confining myself, instead to this solitary observation. The assumption of this article and many other articles written from within the viewpoint of Wundt's empiriological psychology, is that the ultimate standard for everything is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. But that makes life meaningless, and destroys the very thing it values (cf. the destruction of Companiate marriage, mentioned by Wilcox and Nock, 2006, by the very pursuit of Companiate marriage). Pleasure is always a by-product, merely, of a good thing. Pleasure is good, but its function is to be the handmaiden to good actions, to reward good actions and make them more likely. One of the reasons this is so is that we are changeable; the object of all our dreams quickly becomes last year's Christmas present.

So the proper question is not really, "How pleasurable is marriage to its incumbents?" but "How well are the incumbents performing marriage?" I think this article illustrates a corollary to the principle of the subordination of pleasure, mentioned by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, which is this: that those who have the strongest habits of good action will also tend to be the most satisfied anyway. Christian housewives tend to be more satisfied than Sinead O'Connor (as Wilcox & Nock 2006 also discover); but even if they were miserable, their lot would be preferable to someone living a fake "happiness" in the Matrix or on the Truman Show.

The really important Dependent Variable here is how much the husbands attend to their wives' emotional needs--because it is the only good action investigated. There are other variables which would be equally useful to measure, but the point is that good action is more important than the subjective result of good action. In fact, continually asking people how "happy" they are in the marriages would seem to lead to the invidious comparisons which lead to unhappiness--and then to "unhappiness."

For further thought or discussion, here is an interesting article from the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9572187/Couples-who-share-the-housework-are-more-likely-to-divorce-study-finds.html

Reference

Wilcox, W. B. & Nock, S. L. (2006). What's love got to do with it? Equality, equity, commitment, and women's marital quality. Social Forces, 84 (3), p.1321-1345.