LIFE COURSE VARIABLES
The life course perspective (Elder, 1994), with its emphasis on the timing
and duration of events, incorporates factors such as age at marriage,
duration of marriage, and the presence of children.With respect to age at
marriage, individuals who marry at younger ages tend to report more marital
problems and experience a greater risk of divorce than individuals who
marry at older ages (Bumpass et al., 1991). The negative consequences of
marrying at an early age may be due to psychological immaturity, unstable
employment, and a truncated spousal-search process.With respect to duration
of marriage, divorces occur more often in the early rather than the
later years of marriage (White, 1991). Becker (1991) argued that people
generally have imperfect information about their partners during courtship
but learn substantially more about their spouses after marriage.
Consequently early divorces are disproportionately due to the discovery
of basic incompatibility, conflict in values, and personality clashes. Nev-
606 JOURNAL OF FAMILY ISSUES / July 2003
ertheless, couples in marriages of long duration face challenges (such as
raising children, boredom with the relationship, and gradually diverging
interests and attitudes) that differ from those of individuals in marriages of
short duration. Indeed, studies have shown that marital duration is associated
with long-term declines in marital happiness (Johnson, Amoloza, &
Booth, 1992).