Couple Concordance in Courtship Process and Marital Instability in a Rapidly Changing Non-Western Society

Dirgha J. Ghimire, University of Michigan

This paper investigates the relationships between couple concordance in courtship, spouse choice and marital instability. Couple concordance refers to the degree of agreement between spouses in reporting courtship process and spouse choice. We use data from Chitwan Valley Family Study, a setting which until recently was characterized as a society with arranged marriage, highly gender segregated relationships and love less marriages. However, contrary to the characterization our results suggest a remarkable increase in participation in spouse choice and marital instability, and a gradual increase in autonomous courtship and solely choosing a spouse. At the aggregate level the results show strong, negative associations between courtship process and marital instability. However, when disaggregated by gender, this remained strong and statistically significant for males but not for females. On the other hand, there is strong, positive association between participation in spouse choice and marital instability for females but not for males. Interestingly, results also show a strong, negative, statistically significant association between the concordance between spouses on all three measures and marital instability.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Gender Dynamics, Longitudinal studies , Mixed methods research

See extended abstract.