Decoding Love

by Andrew Trees

  WHY YOU SHOULD TIE THE KNOT

  For people still on the fence about marriage who think that maybe the healthiest response is simply to avoid the entire institution, there is abundant evidence that you will be better off in the long run as part of a married couple. Most important, you will very likely lead a happier life because of it. In one recent survey, 40 percent of married adults said that they were very satisfied compared to only 25 percent of people who had never been married (a result duplicated in a number of other studies). Single people also suffer from depression at far higher rates. Marriage proved more important as a predictor of happiness than one’s job or one’s finances or one’s community. Why? It turns out that there are all sorts of built-in benefits for married couples.

  Let’s start with sex. Although the marital bed has long been a source of humor, married couples are having more and better sex than the swinging singles. According to a national survey, 42 percent of married women said that their sex lives were extremely emotionally and physically satisfying compared to 31 percent of single women who had a sexual partner. How important is sex to happiness? If I were going to write the world’s shortest self-help book, it would be: more sex! A slew of studies have found connections between healthy sexual activity and longevity. In one study, the death rate for the least sexually active group was twice as high as the most active group. Economists have even quantified the benefits in dollars. As I mentioned in the chapter on economics, increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to once a week generates the same amount of happiness as earning an additional $50,000 a year. Economists have also placed a value on marriage itself. A lasting marriage is the equivalent of earning an extra $115,000 annually.

  Scientists have discovered all sorts of benefits due to regular sex—better blood flow and circulation, boosting the immune system, warding off colds and infections, making us less susceptible to depression. A survey of 16,000 Americans found that those who had the most sex were also the happiest. What does this have to do with getting married? Married people have a huge built-in advantage when it comes to regular sex for the simple reason that they have a lifelong sexual partner. That’s not to say that they don’t face their own challenges, such as maintaining passion for one another over the years, but they do have more sex—on average 30 percent more—and better sex, according to the studies.

  There are other benefits as well. Even leaving sex aside, marriage improves your health. As we saw in chapter 3½, single people have significantly higher rates of mortality (50 percent higher for women, and a whopping 250 percent higher for men), and not being married reduces the average man’s life more than heart disease. Not being married shortens a woman’s life more than cancer or living in poverty. There are a host of reasons for this. Men are likely to cut back on a range of unhealthy activities, such as drinking, when they get married. Marriage also brings significant economic advantages. Married men and women enjoy higher average household incomes. In 1997, married couples averaged $47,129 compared to $26,203 for single men and $15,892 for single women.

  Perhaps most important, there are the subtle and less quantifiable benefits. What sort of value do you place on companionship? It is difficult to put a number on that, but studies have shown that loneliness causes stress and weakens the immune system. We are social beings, and marriage is the great bulwark against finding ourselves alone. Luckily, most seem to realize this. When people are asked to name their top goals, a happy marriage always heads the list. For those who want more evidence on the benefits of matrimony, I invite you to read Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite’s The Case For Marriage, which systematically lays out all of these advantages and numerous others that accrue to happily married couples. But these numbers come with a big caveat—an unhappy marriage can turn these rosy statistics in the other direction. According to one study, an unhappy marriage increases your chances of getting sick by 35 percent and shortens your life by an average of four years. And economists have estimated that getting divorced is the equivalent of losing $66,000 annually.

  MARRIAGE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  Of course, if a happy marriage was easy to achieve, we’d have a much lower divorce rate and far fewer affairs. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to fall in love than it is to stay in love. Just as we can use the body’s own chemistry to chart the effect of infatuation, we can also use it to understand that waning desire is a natural part of any long-term relationship. As Oscar Wilde said, “The essence of romance is uncertainty,” but uncertainty is precisely what you are giving up when you get married. Sadly, finding the right person can never be reduced simply to smelling sweaty T-shirts, appealing though that prospect might be. As studies have shown, this chemical element of romance lessens over time. One researcher has found that the altered brain chemistry of falling in love lasts roughly six to eight months. Others have found that it takes two to three years for the feelings of infatuation to fade to feelings of neutrality—not mild attraction but neutrality!

  The problem with relying on our passion to guide us is that a marriage has to stand the test of time to be successful. Some people may feel relieved when they get divorced, but I don’t think anyone has ever counted it as a success. To base a long-term relationship on short-term chemistry alone is a little like buying a car based on how it’s going to run for the first one hundred miles.

  This isn’t a marital problem. It’s a human problem. We all experience this waning of desire in countless ways. The excitement of anticipation gives way to the dullness of routine. If you have ever bought a new car or started a new job, you have experienced this sensation. This isn’t such a big deal when it comes to a car purchase. If you have the money, it’s a relatively simple matter to get a new car. But it is a huge deal when it comes to marriage. The funny thing about the waning of our desires is that even though all of us have gone through this multiple times, studies show that we forget about it each and every time. We also do a terrible job of predicting how we will feel in the future, always expecting that it will be more like that present than it is. You can imagine how potentially destructive these habits of mind are for a couple who marries while still infatuated with each other.

  If you are one of those people who simply refuse to accept this and want your passion to burn as brightly after forty years as it does after one day, there is one possible solution—more sex. According to several experiments, animals show less habituation to positive feelings when given oxytocin, which is released during sex. It’s not clear how much sexual activity it will take to hold habituation at bay, but I invite any energetic readers to give it their best shot. For the rest of us, it’s time to come to terms once again with the cost of the romantic story line.

  BEWARE EXPECTATIONS, PART II

  Perhaps the biggest single problem for many married couples today is the enormous expectations that are routinely loaded onto marriage by both the culture at large and the couples themselves. Just think of the various social roles that have been conflated into the marital relationship—best friend, closest kin relationship, sexual playmate, and economic partner to name just a few. So many extravagant hopes are now built into marriage that some researchers have dubbed it “the cult of the couple”—a cult that can even prove fatal. According to research, men who murder their wives are especially strong believers in the idea of finding a soul mate and practicing strict monogamy. Traditionally, though, this was not the case. Your wife or husband was just that, and people did not expect their partners to perform numerous other roles, such as best friend.

  Of course, traditionally, marriage itself was based on a number of considerations of which love was only one. A whole array of forces—economic, religious, and societal—buttressed the commitment between a man and a woman, but that has changed. Today, for example, fewer women are having children, and more women are economically independent than ever before. In many ways, that’s a wonderful development. But it means that even the economic and parental bonds that used to tie a husband
and wife together are disappearing. As these traditional ties disappear, the only thing left holding the relationship together is love, and that is a very fragile reed on which to rest so much weight. With all of those other bonds stripped away, marriage is dependent solely on personal fulfillment—or, to put a fig leaf on it, love. But this shift has only worsened the problem. The more committed we become to the narrow idea that marriage should be the source of most of our happiness, the more dissatisfied we inevitably become with the relationship itself. In the early 1970s, the percentage of men who described their marriage as “very happy” was 70 percent. By the mid-1990s, that number had fallen to 64 percent. Women have experienced the same drop, the number of “very happy” falling from 67 percent to 62 percent. It’s no accident that this has occurred at precisely the same time that love has been enshrined as the key to marriage.

  At the very least, we need to recognize that marriage is not a solution to all of life’s problems. In A General Theory of Love, the authors declare, “When they do get down to relating, Americans find they have been tutored for years in the wrong art. In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being in love while discounting the importance of loving.” In fact, the relationship itself, for all of its benefits, creates a number of problems all on its own, so much so that one psychologist has called marriage “a disagreement machine.” Evolutionary psychology itself provides little comfort for those who would like to believe that a happy marriage is a simple and natural achievement. As David Buss has noted, “Humans were not designed by natural selection to coexist in niceness and matrimonial bliss. They were designed for individual survival and genetic reproduction. The psychological mechanisms fashioned by these ruthless criteria are often selfish ones.”

  Although a successful marriage does bring all sorts of wonderful benefits, we would all be much more likely to achieve that goal if we lowered our expectations about what marriage will do for us. Actually, you can make the argument that we would be better off if we lowered our expectations across the board. When it comes to life satisfaction, Danes easily outclassed the competition in an international survey. One of the reasons is that they have consistently low expectations for the future. But to return to the question of love, it’s not that we shouldn’t include it as one of the considerations when we get married. However, love alone is not enough. Perhaps the question is not why almost half of our marriages end in divorce but, given our exalted expectations, how half of them manage to succeed. I hope this chapter can offer some answers to that question.

  WHY IT’S BETTER NOT TO BE TOO MUCH IN LOVE

  One place we might look for answers is arranged marriages. Earlier, I cited a study of Indian arranged marriages, which found that those marriages were happier over time than Western marriages. Orthodox Jews who use a matchmaker have reported similar experiences of love continuing to grow after marriage. If we are willing to loosen our grip on the romantic story line, we might just find that our ideas about the course of love and marriage are out of whack. Right now, our ideal image of marriage looks something like this:

  We are supposed to be ecstatic on our wedding day and also live happily ever after. Does that look remotely realistic to anyone? Yet that is the rough outline of most pop culture presentations of the romantic story line. Now, let’s look at a graph at what love looks like for arranged marriages:

  Doesn’t that seem both more realistic and, ultimately, a far healthier outlook for long-term happiness?

  What I’m saying strikes at the core of the romantic story line and at some of our most cherished myths about love and marriage. But the research is there to back it up. Take, for example, the PAIR Project run by Ted Huston at the University of Texas at Austin. Launched back in 1981, the project has followed 168 newlyweds, studying everything from their early courtship to the eventual success or failure of the relationship. His work is unusually revealing because it looks at couples much earlier in their relationship and for a much longer period of time than virtually any other study. And what Huston and his fellow researchers have discovered challenges many of the central elements of the romantic story line.

  Let’s start with the idea that you should marry someone you are madly in love with. Who hasn’t attended a wedding where the couple seems completely enamored with each other and thought, I hope I find a love like that. It turns out that our envy of those blissful couples is entirely misplaced. They are more likely to get divorced because those feelings of romantic ecstasy are impossible to maintain (less surprisingly, the PAIR project also found that couples who have a brief courtship are more vulnerable to divorce and that many newlyweds are not blissfully in love when they marry).

  This is only one of a number of surprising findings. For example, it turns out that even large differences in taste are not important to the success of a marriage—unless you brood about them. Brooding, they found, leads to divorce. And conflict itself is not a sign of trouble; instead, the key for couples is to preserve positive feelings for each other. Loss of affection, not conflict, is the great predictor of divorce. Even longevity is not necessarily an indication of success. Huston has found that some couples have lackluster relationships but do not divorce. They basically accept that married life is a source of modest dissatisfaction.

  The PAIR project does offer support for some folk wisdom. For example, women should trust their intuition. Women in the study who feared that the marriage might have future problems generally discovered that their fears were well founded. You also don’t have to hang around for years to see if the marriage will improve. According to Huston, the first two years tend to reveal whether or not you are going to be happy. And forget about having a baby to solve your problems. The birth of a child does not change how a couple feels about each other. The project also confirms what numerous other studies have suggested—men with feminine traits make better husbands.

  I know what you are thinking. You would never fall into any of these traps. You are too savvy. You probably feel that you can just look at a couple and predict with great accuracy whether or not they will stay together. Well, I’m here to tell you that you are deluded, at least according to a study by Rachel Ebling and Robert Levenson. The two researchers showed people three-minute videotapes of five couples who stayed married and five couples who got divorced and then asked the viewers to make predictions about those couples. Most people were terrible at predicting which couples would get divorced and scored at a level only 4 percent above random chance. In this instance, women’s intuition also proved to be no help. The study found that women were no better at predicting than men. And in a stunning confirmation of body language over spoken language, the researchers found that listening to the actual content of the conversations made for less accurate predictions. But the scary part is what Ebling and Levenson found when they gave the same test to trained professionals, such as therapists. It turned out that the pros were just as bad at figuring out what would happen to the couples as the ordinary people and scored no better than if they had randomly guessed.

  Married couples who are feeling smug about how well they know their partners should also take stock. According to another study, the longer couples were married to each other, the worse they became at reading each other’s minds. They also became more confident over time in their ability to guess what their partner was thinking. In other words, they were getting more confident in their predictions at the same time that their predictions were getting less accurate. The reason for this failure of marital communication was that the longer a couple was married, the less attention they paid to each other. For any theory of marriage predicated on good communication, the study reveals just how daunting that task can be.

  THE LOVE LAB

  While you or I may not be very good at predicting whether or not a couple has the right stuff or even what our partner is thinking, there is someone who is very good at it—John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington. He run
s the Gottman Institute, which has been affectionately dubbed “the love lab.” Gottman has been studying couples and trying to understand why they succeed and fail since the 1970s. To do this, he has come up with a method of analysis that is probably the most rigorous attempt to decode marital interactions ever invented. Typically, he will videotape a couple while they discuss something about which they disagree. That in itself is nothing special. What sets Gottman apart is his method of analysis. He and his researchers then break down the tape for both content and affect. He has developed an elaborate scoring system that covers virtually every emotion a couple might express. Each fleeting emotional tic is scored so that a few seconds’ exchange will result in several notations for each person. The love lab also adds another layer of data—the couples are hooked up to heart monitors as well as other biofeedback equipment to measure people’s stress levels during the conversation. To give you some idea of how rigorous and exhaustive this method is, Gottman estimates that it takes twenty-eight hours to analyze a single hour of videotape.

  What all this painstaking analysis offers is a level of precision unequalled by anyone else studying marriage. Gottman’s methods are incredibly good at determining which couples will succeed and which will fail. How good? If he analyzes an hour-long conversation, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy if a couple will still be married fifteen years later. Needless to say, after years of practice, Gottman has become spectacularly good at seeing what most of us miss. He understands relationships in the way that Tiger Woods plays golf—with a kind of effortless grasp that makes the rest of us look inept.