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Mathematical Secret to a Happy Marriage? August 27, 2008

Posted by atharkhan in : Personal , 1 comment so far

I’ve been married for a few days and already the tech-nerd in me wants to “engineer” this relationship for “optimal” output. I believe that any relationship sets its course at its outset and that is why I was trying to figure out what type of behavior increases the chances of happiness.

So, I set out searching (I can’t bring myself to say “Googling”) to figure out what makes for a happy marriage. As it turns out, psychologist John Gottman and applied mathematicians James Murray and Kristin Swanson at the Relationship Research Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle have set forth a mathematical model that can predict the success or failure of a marriage with 94% accuracy. (Here’s a link to the story at BBC).

To make their predictions, the team videotapes a married couple’s conversation about an area of marital contention. Then, they quantify the ratio of positive to negative interactions during this conversation. The higher the ratio, the better the marriage. Where the ratio falls below 5:1, the marriage could be doomed.

I found this to be very interesting. Do you think there is any merit to this theory? What do you think I can do to ensure a happy and long lasting marriage?

Apartment Hunting August 14, 2008

Posted by atharkhan in : Personal , add a comment

We have narrowed our apartment search down to a couple of places and hopefully one of them will work out. We’re also going to have to sell one or both of our cars and some of our furniture because we will probably have to live in a small, high-rise apartment rather than the larger single family home we were going to live in.

So, these days we’re trying to figure out where and how to sell our furniture and cars. Not sure if we should just go to a dealer and sell our cars or try CraigsList or Ebay.

Wedding’s Over August 11, 2008

Posted by atharkhan in : Personal , 1 comment so far

The wedding is finally over and today was our first day off after the bar exam. We spent the day browsing the web for apartments and have narrowed it down to a couple of options. Hopefully, we will have this wrapped up before we arrive in Chicago in a couple of weeks.