Mathematical Secret to a Happy Marriage? August 27, 2008
Posted by atharkhan in : Personal , trackbackI’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?
Comments»
The article doesn’t state why these couples got together or what their expectations were. How about how long they got to know each other before jumping into such a deep relationship? Would a reasonable person be surprised at some of the “failures”?
Engineers tend to love optimizing, but are often poor at defining what optimization of the system is. What attributes would you choose to gauge success?
Maybe process improvement is the answer. First, don’t spend the next seven years trying to change each other. Live with ups and downs. Looking back, the “big” issues may not be so big, and you will find that you were wrong where you stood your ground. Say that you’re sorry more than you’re right. Remember her birthday. Pretend to know which hair color looks good on her. Be nice to her mother. Turn off the computer. Turn off the computer. Use the word “Googling”. Its not the last thing that you’re going to give up.