ROMANTIC INTERESThigher than among their married peers. The unmarried participants
were at greater risk of death from infectious disease and cardiovascular
disease, as well as accidents, murder and suicide.
There’s no shortage of agony aunts, relationship therapists and self-
help books available and willing to offer sure-fire advice on how to make
a relationship last. The reality is that psychological science doesn’t have
any definite answers – no two relationships are the same, and sometimes
there’s no avoiding the fact that a partnership has simply run its course.
However, examining the characteristics of
couples who have stayed together compared
with those who split up can be revealing. The
marriage expert John Gottman, director and
co-founder of the Gottman Relationship
Institute in Seattle, videoed couples talking
to each other about their past or about
an issue they disagreed on, and followed
them up three years later. Looking back at
the tapes showed that those who remained
together had used a 5:1 ratio of positive to
negative statements when conversing with
each other. By contrast, the couples who ended up splitting had uttered
as many negative as positive comments when interacting. The lesson, it
seems, is that if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say it – at least
not if you want your relationship to last.
Other findings worth noting involve what psychologist Brooke Feeney
calls the dependency paradox. Feeney, a professor at Carnegie Mellon
University, followed 165 married couples and focused on cases where
one partner had given the other plentiful, unconditional support. Rather
than the support fostering a neediness, supported partners six months
later tended to have achieved more goals and were more self-sufficient
and secure than they were before. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t
strive for balance in our relationships. After monitoring 101 student
couples for nearly five years, Susan Sprecher at Illinois State University
found that individuals who felt they were investing more in a relation-
ship than they were getting out of it tended to be less satisfied with – and
less committed to – that relationship, making it more likely to end.
Other research suggests that making each other laugh, performing new
activities together, sharing secrets and treating each other with respect
can all help prolong a relationship’s longevity.
“Beauty is all very
well at first sight; but
who ever looks at it
when it has been in
the house three days?”
George Bernard Shaw,
Man and Superman
(1903)