Don't be so quick to dismiss those pre-wedding jitters: A new survey suggests that cold feet could signal marital trouble down the road.
U.K. law firm Slater and Gordon surveyed more than 1,600 divorcés about their wedding days and found that half of them had serious doubts about the relationship before walking down the aisle. Sixty-five percent of those polled admitted they'd even considered going the "Runaway Bride" route and bolting the day of the wedding.
So why'd they go through with it in spite of their doubts? The majority of respondents said they simply thought it was too late to pull out and didn't want to let their fiancé down. One in 10 polled said they'd spent so much money on the wedding, they couldn't bring themselves to call it off.
“It’s incredibly common for people to go into marriages with doubts," Amanda McAlister, an attorney at Slater and Gordon, said in a press release. "There can also be a lot of optimism at the wedding, but this can fade with time."
The survey may be non-academic but it checks out with recent research. A 2012 study published in Journal of Family Psychology suggested that a bride's pre-wedding jitters more than doubled the odds of divorce. The researchers also found that pre-marital doubts from either partner was linked with lower marital satisfaction for that partner over time.
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