When the honeymoon is over, newly wedded couples need to work at maintaining satisfaction and happiness in their relationship, a recent study shows.
Research out of Brigham Young University found that while couples experience a honeymoon phase in their marriages, their bliss usually decreases after 10 to 15 years.
"We see that this marital happiness rebounds … but it never rebounds to the original levels," Spencer James, an assistant professor in BYU's Department of Family Life who conducted the research, told the Deseret News.
The study, "Variation in Trajectories of Women's Marital Quality," was published in Social Science Research Journal. Data for the study was collected from more than 2,604 women who were born between 1954 and 1964.
Some of the questions to gauge marital satisfaction included how happy the women were, how often the women laughed with their spouse and how often the women communicated with their husband on a daily basis, according to the Daily Mail.
James found about 65 percent of the women said they were less happy 10 to 15 years into their marriages, the Daily Mail reported. James also found that 85 percent of the women said they laughed and spoke to their spouse less over the years.
In addition, James told the Deseret News, there was an increase in marital conflict.
“Conflict increases over the first decade of marriage, perhaps due to unresolved, and potentially unresolvable, issues," James said in the Express. "The same issues recur frequently before the couple either resolves them or decides to abandon them" and “this pattern requires time before hurt feelings are fully discharged.”
These marital conflicts might include ongoing problems with in-laws, money management, household chores, household responsibilities, child rearing or intimacy.
In the study, James found that low-income earners and premarital cohabiters had lower marriage satisfaction than their counterparts, reported The Huffington Post.
According to the study, after about 10 years of marriage more women than men seemed to be affected by the pressures of maintaining a household and tending to children.
"When you couple that with the fact that people now have children and they start dealing with some of their (marital) issues, maybe they realize their spouse isn’t as perfect as they once thought," James said to The Huffington Post.
James told the Huffington Post that married couples, especially those concerned with a decline in their marital bliss, should focus on finding their own way to be happy without trying to compare their relationship to other couples.
"It's your marriage, it’s not society's," James said.
Email: kclark@deseretnews.com; Twitter: @clark_kelsey3