Research has come up with many good advices for couples, focusing on their decades of marriage. Let’s walk down to cover to capture the experience of surveys taken from people 65 years age or older. This survey includes questions ranging from finding compatible partner to advices on relationship and love. In subsequent in-person interviews with more than 300 long-wedded individuals — those in unions of 30, 40, 50, or more years — the study captured more insights for overcoming common marriage troubles. Following up, the survey also includes divorced individuals too, asking how others might avoid marital breakups.

When it comes for wedding, it is a season of full swing and changes in life. Surveys have more to learn from older adults whose love has endured job changes, child-rearing, economics certainty health concerns and other life changes.

The larger the survey, more will be the accuracy. With this formula, largest in-depth survey is done all over the world, filling our knowledge gap on finding a mate and remaining married. This ever done project is completed in a people of very long unions, surveying more than 700 individuals wedded for a total of 40,000 years. The findings are captured in a sophisticated and prescribed manner.

The average age of interviewees was 77 and included 58 percent women and 42 percent men. The average length of marriage in the sample was 44 years; the couple with the longest marriage were ages 98 and 101 and had been married 76 years. Responses were coded into the most commonly occurring recommendations, resulting in a list of the most frequently selected lessons for a successful, long-term relationship.

The survey goal was to take advantage of wisdom of crowds, collecting the love and relationship advice of a large and varied cross-section of long-married elders in a scientifically reliable and valid way. This survey focused on a small number of stories, uncovering up advices for couples walking down the aisle or decades into marriage.

The top five lessons from the elders, along with survey’s analysis:

  1. Learn to communicate:For a good marriage, the elders overwhelmingly gives importance to talking. They stress their partner to talk, talk and talk. They believe most marital problems can be solved through open communication, likewise effective communication opens up way for effective solution. Other part of the survey, includes break up and conversely many whose marriages dissolved blamed lack of communication.
  2. Get to know your partner very well before marrying:Survey concludes that it is almost impossible to change your partner. Many of the experienced older people in the survey married very young. They strongly advise younger people to wait to marry until they have gotten to know their partner well and have a number of shared experiences. An important part of this advice is a lesson that was endorsed in very strong terms: Never get married expecting to be able to change your partner.
  3. Treat marriage as an unbreakable, lifelong commitment:Enjoying our present movement of married life comes out to be far more beneficial than rather seeing marriage as a voluntary partnership. Marriage generally lasts only as long as the passion does, the researchers propose a mind-set in which it is a profound commitment to be respected, even if things go sour over the short term. Many struggled through dry and unhappy periods and found ways to resolve them — giving them the reward of a fulfilling, intact marriage in later life.
  4. Learn to work as a team:Researchers urge people to apply what they have learned from our lifelong experiences in teams — in sports, in work, in the military — to marriage. Concretely, this viewpoint involves seeing problems as collective to the couple, rather than the domain of one partner. Any difficulty, illness, or setback experienced by one member of the couple is the other partner’s responsibility.
  5. Chose a partner who is very similar to you:Marriage is difficult at times for everyone, the researchers assert, but it’s much easier with someone who shares similar interests, background and orientation. The most critical need for similarity is in core values regarding potentially contentious issues like child-rearing, how money should be spent and religion.

According to researchers, these unique insights show the value of using rigorous survey methods to uncover the practical wisdom of older people. Researchers also specifically advised for subtle mindset for a critical life domain like marriage. Therefore, the study points the way toward the need for future implementation on concrete lessons over the course of our lives.