Posted on: Sunday, August 12, 2007
Secrets of long, happy marriages
By Susan Brink
Los Angeles Times
Beyond the chemistry of passion and romance, at the intersection of feeling and understanding, lies the hope of happily ever after.
Researchers call this state companionate love — the kind of love people feel after years of arguments, joy, tragedies and successes mutually felt. To arrive there, couples have to get on the road to success pretty quickly. About a third of divorces occur after just four years of marriage, according to Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, psychologist at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
Here's some success tips from relationship experts, based on surveys of couples in relationships that have lasted.
Couples who stay together kid themselves a bit. For example, they typically underestimate their partners' interest in others. "If you show people pictures of attractive men and women and ask how their partner will look at this person, they underestimate the person's attractiveness to their partner," says Gian Gonzaga, senior research scientist at eHarmony Labs. "It turns out that's actually good because we're not constantly worrying and obsessing."
Long-term couples don't update their images of each other. "People stick with their initial view," Gonzaga says. "As people get older, they get less attractive, but we don't update." It's why Katharine Hepburn's character in "On Golden Pond" could look at the aging, crabby character played by Henry Fonda and declare: "You're my knight in shining armor."
Those who endure have a story, and they stick to it. Robert Sternberg, dean of the school of arts and science at Tufts University, has researched this and has come up with about two dozen relationship stories, some good, some bad. The "fairy tale story" has a prince and a princess; the "visionist story" is a business model, accumulating homes, goods and successful children; the "travel story" says that life is a journey; the "police story" divides the partners' roles into cop and perp, with the former constantly monitoring the latter; the "war story" means that two people expect constant fights. "What our research shows is that couples tend to be more satisfied if they have matching story profiles," Sternberg says. Pair a fairy tale believer with a war story believer and "it won't work," he says.
Anxiety or depression is relationship poison. "Do everything you can to make yourself less anxious and depressed," says Arthur Aron, psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
The best predictor of divorce, Aron says, has little to do with love, even less to do with initial attraction. It has to do with the availability of other options. If people are happy, other options are less appealing and they're more likely to stay married. If they're unhappy but can't imagine an alternative that isn't even worse, again, they'll stay married. (This is the probable reason many abused women stay in their relationships.) But if someone is gorgeous, rich and hot, he or she might have difficulty sticking with one mate. "Movie stars have a hard time because they constantly have great alternatives thrust in front of them," Aron says.
