The five most common myths about marriage
Enty of opinions are floating around about how to live married.
Marriage is one of the oldest social, economic, religious and legal institutions in the world, and there’s no shortage of opinions on what makes it work. But much of the conventional wisdom is not based on evidence, and some is flat-out wrong. After researching thousands of couples for more than 40 years at the Gottman Institute, these are some of the myths we’ve encountered most often.
MythNo.1
Common interests keep you together.
Some dating sites, like Match. com, ask users to list their interests to help attract potential mates, and LoveFlutter matches users solely based on shared hobbies and activities. In a Pew survey, 64 percent of respondents said “having shared interests” is “very important” to their marriages — beating out having a satisfying sexual relationship and agreeing on politics.
But the important thing is not what you do together; it’s how you interact while doing it. Any activity can drive a wedge between two partners if they’re negative toward each other. Our research has shown that criticism is one of the four destructive behaviors that indicate a couple will eventually divorce. A stronger predic- torofcompa tibility than shared interests is the ratio of positive to negative interactions, which should be 20-to-1 in everyday situations, regardless of whether a couple is doing something they both enjoy.
Myth No. 2 Nevergotobed angry.
It’s one of the most clichéd pieces of relationship advice,
immortalized in Etsy signage and a ’90s R&B ballad by SilkNo less an authority than the Bible agrees: “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26).
This advice pushes couples to solve their problems right away. Yet everyone has their own methods of dealing with disagreements, and research indicates that about twothirds of recurring issues in marriage are never resolved because of personality differences — you’re unlikely to work out that fight about the dishes no matter how late you stay up.
Myth No. 3 Couples therapy is for fixing a broken marriage.
This is a common misconception. A 2014 New York Post story on “the crumbling marriage of Jay-Z and Beyoncé” noted grimly that “they’re allegedly traveling with marriage counselors.” Seeking help early in or even before marriage is often seen as a red flag.
This idea often keeps spouses from seeking the sort of regular maintenance that would benefit almost any relationship. The average couple waits six years after serious issues arise before getting help with their marital problems, and by then it’s often too late: Half of all divorces occur within the first seven years of marriage.
The point of counseling is about revealing the truth about a relationship. As Jay-Z told David Letterman, he gained “emotional tools” in counseling to help him maintain his marriage.
Myth No. 4
Affairs are the main cause of divorce.
While affairs can destroy the foundation of trust upon which a marriage is built, the cause of divorce typically precedes the affair. In a study from the Divorce Mediation Project, 80 percent of divorced men and women cited growing apart and loss of a sense of closeness to their partner as the reason for divorce. Only 20 percent to 27 percent blamed their separation on an extramarital affair.
Myth No. 5 Marriages benefit from a ‘relationship contract.’
It’s important to do nice things for your partner and to do your fair share around the house, principles that an increasing number of couples have decided to formalize with a contract.
The concept, though, has no basis in science. In 1997, researcher Bernard Murstein found that marriages oriented around reciprocity were less successful.
Consider one thing nearly all couples fight about: housework. A couple wants to have an even division of chores and responsibilities, so they make a contract. But a few months later, there’s a pile of dishes in the sink, and they’re fighting again. According to a study of 3,000 couples by Harvard Business School, the solution is to ditch the contract and spend money on a cleaning service. Why? So the couple can spend more time together having positive interactions and fewer arguments. Instead of a contract, it’s a compromise.