ABSTRACT
As the divorce rate has risen in American society, the need to explain the factors lying behind marital failures has been more keenly felt. This chapter examines a wide range of background factors that make marital success to see whether they help to explain the marital histories of women in the Detroit sample. Researchers have tried to fathom what makes the difference between a good and a bad marriage, and between couples who divorce and those who stay together. Several aspects of premarital sexuality have also been mentioned by researchers as influencing the fate of the eventual marriage. Perceived similarity in class origins fosters marriage quality and inhibits marriage problems slightly, but does not have any significant impact on marital stability. However, it is difficult to understand what to make of this finding, since none of the objective measures of homogamy in social class has a comparable impact on marital success.
