Predicting Divorce among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion

This study tested the hypothesis that how a discussion of a marital conflict begins — in its first few minutes — is a predictor of divorce. The marital conflict discussion of 124 newlywed couples was coded using the Specific Affect Coding System, and the data were divided into positive, negative, and positive‐minus‐negative affect totals for five 3‐minute intervals. It was possible to predict marital outcome over a 6‐year period using just the first 3 minutes of data for both husbands and wives. For husbands this prediction improved as the groups diverged in the remaining 12 minutes; for wives the prediction remained equally powerful for the remaining 12 minutes as it had been in the first 3 minutes.