New research reveals actionable marriage magic
Marital satisfaction—and that extends to long-term partmerships—is critical to happiness AND health. So what if someone told you a simple 21-minute exercise could save your marriage again and again? New research is doing just that.
The trick? A writing intervention that helps spouses adopt a more objective outlook on marital conflict.
“I don’t want it to sound like magic, but you can get pretty impressive results with minimal intervention,” said Eli Finkel, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at Northwestern. But it might be magic: the research says that three, 7-minute writing exercises administered online prevents couples from losing that loving feeling.
“Having a high-quality marriage is one of the strongest predictors of happiness and health,” says Finkel. He argues that 21 minutes a year is a small but invaluable investment in the marriage. His two-year study involved 120 couples, half assigned the reappraisal intervention and the other not. Every four months, all spouses reported their relationship satisfaction, love, intimacy, trust, passion, and commitment.
The reappraisal writing task has participants think and write about their most recent disagreement with their partner from the perspective of a neutral third party. The spouses who completed the writing exercise three times during Year 2 completely eliminated the stereotypical decline in marital satisfaction! Although couples in the two conditions fought just as frequently, the intervention couples sustained marital satisfaction because the fights stressed them out less.
“Not only did this effect emerge for marital satisfaction, it also emerged for other relationship processes—like passion and sexual desire—that are especially vulnerable to the ravages of time,” Finkel says.
More health, happiness, passion, and love in just 21 minutes? Sounds like magic worth trying to us.
Image: Some rights reserved by Sergio Vassio