Sociologist Ernest Burgess was one of the first people to study married couples. In the 1930s he wanted to develop a scientific measure to predict the success rate of marriages. In his longitudinal study of married couples, he found that beginning with newlyweds, and as you went further along the married life spectrum, marital satisfaction was a U-shaped curve. Marital satisfaction began plummeting after the wedding and then took a big downward dive when the first child arrived—taking bigger nosedives with every subsequent child. If the couple didn’t divorce while at the bottom, then marital
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