Checking on the state of the union

Survey measures satisfaction in Orthodox marriages

By Mayer Fertig

Issue of Jan. 30, 2009 / 5 Shevat 5769

Frank Buchweitz wishes every engaged couple would become educated about marriage before they march down the aisle, but mostly he settles for running programs to help already married couples stay that way. Buchweitz, the Orthodox Union’s national director of community services and special projects, is running an anonymous online poll of Orthodox married couples.

The study, “hopefully, will provide information on the state of the union,” he said. “It will give some good feedback on the direction to take” in planning future programs.

The Aleinu Marriage Satisfaction Survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete and will be available online until March 31 at www.ou.org/marriage_satisfaction. It’s a project of the Aleinu Family Resource Center in Los Angeles and the Rabbinical Council of California, where it was first offered.

“Unfortunately now in the shidduch world people know all about the caterer” and other aspects of planning a wedding, “but they don’t know about getting married,” he observed. “I would love to see pre-marital education be a requirement.”

Buchweitz has run marriage retreats during three of the last four summers. They draw an “interesting turnout of people — a cross-section of the community, looking for information.”

“When they’re calling up to register for a marriage retreat, right away they think you’re a psychologist and start telling you all the problems of their life. I tell them that marriage retreats are for people in good marriages, not marriages that are on the blink or ready to fall apart.”

Citing the commonly held notion that 50 percent of marriages across the country end in divorce, Buchweitz said, “That means that 50 percent of the people are still married.”

And for those who are, he said, “Within marriage itself, how many people are happily married? We don’t know the answer to that.”         “How many are together not because they’re in love but because of utilitarian reasons? Money? The kids? Which is not a good statement on the state of marriage.”

Rabbis involved in counseling are also being surveyed.

“We want to find out what kind of counseling they do,” Buchweitz explained.

He hopes to learn how many couples they see, “for financial stress, a health problem, a religious conflict, domestic violence [or] general stress that may affect marriage.”

Results from the West Coast survey are encouraging, said Dr. David Pelcovitz, who analyzed the findings.

The suprisinging high rate of satisfaction “made me feel good for a couple of weeks,” he said.

Lack of time was cited as the main reason spouses fight — others included lack of money, in-laws, and differences over religion or child-rearing — but three quarters of the 1500 respondents indicated that, given the chance to do it again, they would marry the same person.

Orthodox Jews live "an expensive lifestyle," Pelcovitz noted, and "I think those pressures showed" in the study results, regarding concerns about money.

Pelcovitz, who teaches a course in pastoral psychology to rabbinical students at Yeshiva University, said the survey results from the West Coast led him to add lectures concerning relationships with in-laws.

But, all in all, he stressed, the state of Orthodox marriages, at least on the West Coast, is pretty good, according to the survey results.

"Even if you take into account the 'shanda factor,'" Pelcovitz said, referring to a fear of scandal that might keep some couples together, the divorce rate among Orthodox couples on the West Coast, "really is lower than in the general community. We must be doing something right."