Can You Rate Your Marriage if You’re Bad at Marriage?

How can you know how good you and your partner are at being a couple if you have never experienced a great relationship? How can you know how much energy to put into improving your relationship if you can’t assess how good it is? I've blogged here about the relevance of the Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger & Dunning, 1999) to therapy, and now I want to explore its relationship to marriage.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Marital satisfaction is usually measured by self-report. A good couple’s therapist will help clients evaluate their relationship in other ways, most especially by exploring examples of implementing versus straying from their desired ways of relating to each other. Outside of therapy, though, couples naturally rely on self-assessment. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the tendency of nonexperts to overestimate their performance and the tendency of experts to underestimate their performance. Applied to marriage, people who are bad at marriage tend to think they are better at it than they are, and people who are good at it overly focus on what could be better.

A key reason for the Dunning-Kruger effect is that the same skill set is often needed to assess one’s performance as is needed for expert performance. You can’t master Hollandaise sauce if you aren’t skilled at distinguishing the taste of mediocre Hollandaise from exceptional Hollandaise. You can’t assess your expertise at grammar if you are not an expert at grammar.

Influence of Media

Social media contributes to poor marital assessment because it presents unrealistic images of marriage, with married people so often posting what amounts to PR and unmarried people so often posting negative images of former relationships and unrealistic hopes for the future. Posts on marriage also emphasize unhelpful attention to having or finding the right mate rather than building a mutually desired relationship. Exposure to social media generally distorts self-assessment efforts (Bouffard et al., 2022).

Other media have an equally distorting influence. Just as television leads to distorted estimations of how mean the world is (Gerbner, 1980) because it showcases conflict and violence, television and movies also distort estimations of what marriage is like. How often have you seen a couple depicted on TV that affectionately takes their partner’s dramas in stride? That addresses, discusses, and resolves their conflicts? That makes each other laugh? That checks in with each other on their marital satisfaction? That playfully calls each other out for slights? That schedules enjoyable but not Earth-shattering sex? At best, we see couples that tolerate and accept each other, not couples that are building a relationship together.

So, you probably haven’t seen a lot of great relationships. It’s hard to evaluate your local ethnic restaurant if you’ve never been to San Francisco for comparison. The harm in overestimating your marital satisfaction is that you will not work on improving it. The harm in underestimation is that you will retreat from it and thereby worsen it.

Collaboration

There are a lot of online resources to help you evaluate your relationship, but the most important item on any test of a marriage is whether you are evaluating it on your own or with your partner. If you drag your partner to couples counseling, the first order of business will be to identify mutual goals so that both partners are incentivized to work on things. Good relationships are partnerships before they are anything else, before they take any of the myriad forms that can optimize satisfaction. When it comes to marriage, collaboration is one of those skills needed both for self-assessment and for expertise.

Other marital skills are also required for accurate appraisal of the relationship. You can’t evaluate the marriage if you are secretly tabulating only your own personal satisfaction. To think about the relationship as an entity beyond a context for your own satisfaction is necessary to appraise it, and it is also needed to optimize the marriage.

You have to be relationally and sexually flexible to assess your relationship and to make it work its best. If you have one standard way of being a couple in your mind and one standard regimen for sex, you will be capable of accurately assessing your adherence to the model, but you won’t be in a position to assess whether the model suits you and your partner. That skill of flexibility also makes it more likely that you will find a relational model and a sex life that suits you both.

Marriage Essential Reads

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In assessing your relationship, you will be tempted to assess instead how annoying your partner is. Many people mistake an easy spouse for a good relationship. An accurate assessment, however, will require you to consider how annoying you yourself are. The skill of considering your own annoyingness is central to relational expertise.

Healthy Skepticism

Finally, even to undertake a considered evaluation of your relationship, you must possess a healthy skepticism toward your gut reaction as to how well it’s going—a healthy skepticism toward your self-awareness. This skepticism is a core skill in a marriage. It sets the stage for conflict resolution rather than trying to win a conflict. It allows the partnership to consider the meaning of emotional reactions rather than validating them and bowing down to them.

Applying the Dunning-Kruger effect to marital skill and marital satisfaction highlights the ways in which accurate appraisal of the marriage depends on some of the same skills required for marital success. Further, it reveals how people in boring marriages can mistakenly believe they are satisfied and how people in successful marriages can overly focus on what’s not perfect and underestimate their success.