Married couples frequently assess the happiness and satisfaction of their own marriages by comparing them with those of other couples they know. If they perceive their own relationships to be better than those of others, they are more likely to be satisfied with those relationships. In this sense, then, their marriage measures up on the comparison level scale. There are some inherent dangers in this process that few individuals recognize, however. For example, almost everyone has a tendency to put on their best front when in public and conceal negative aspects in their private relationships. Thus, the comparison level against which some couples compare their own relationship is an artificially created comparison level. They measure themselves against the public mask of others. Each person acknowledges the problems that exist in his or her private life but tends to see only the better side of others. Using Goffman's 9 terms, individual "back regions," with all of their problems, are compared against the carefully contrived "front regions" of other people. It is not very likely that the reality of the former will measure up to the artificiality of the latter.
To whatever extent the above is the case, it is obvious that our sample of divorced respondents felt that their marriages fared very poorly when compared with the marriages of other couples they knew. Each respondent was asked the following question: "Compared with other couples you have known, how would you rate the degree of overall satisfaction that you have felt with your marriage?"
Almost three-fifths of the respondents felt that their marriage that had been terminated through divorce had been somewhat or much less satisfying than were the marriages of other couples they knew. Thus, in terms of the comparison level concepts discussed above, these would have been "unhappy" marriages. However, the remainder of the table affirms the point made earlier that even "happy" marriages are not necessarily stable marriages. A total of 15 percent of the respondents defined their marriage as having been more satisfying than were the marriages of other couples they knew. On this comparison level scale, then, these would have been defined as relatively "happy" marriages. However, they apparently did not measure up in terms of the comparison level for alternatives, though this interpretation cannot be accepted uncritically. For example, one partner may have been quite satisfied with his or her marriage and may have felt that the marriage was significantly better than were the marriages of other couples with which he or she was familiar. The spouse in this relationship, on the other hand, may have been quite unhappy, and may have been the one that initiated the divorce. One should keep in mind the psychological need on the part of the respondent to justify the termination of the marriage to an outside party (in this case, the researcher). The overall effect of this need for justification is virtually impossible to determine. In general, however, it seems that these marriages were quite unsatisfactory when compared with the experiences of others.
The differences between male and female respondents on this question are considerable. Women divorcees are significantly more likely than males to report their former marriage as less satisfying (65 percent of the females compared with 49 percent of the males reported their marriage as much or somewhat less satisfying). On the other hand, males respond much more favorably to that former relationship.
Comparison levels are developed not only by observing the relationships of others but also by determining whether or not a relationship is what we expected it to be when we entered into it. To see how the marriages of our respondents had fared on this second criteria, each individual was asked the following question: "Compared with your expectations of marriage before you were married, how did the marriage turn out?"
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