For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage
by Tara Parker-Pope. Penguin Group, 2010
After her own 17-year marriage went bust, New York Times health blogger Tara Parker-Pope embarked on a new quest: to see what scientific research has to say about making marriage work. In her new book, she takes us on a journey through more than 100 scientific studies that tell us something about couples who have successful marriages: happy couples use humor to good effect, for example, and set limits on the way they argue. Unfortunately, we do not necessarily learn how the rest of us can have happy marriages, too.
The problem is that the book is based almost entirely on correlational studies—you know, the kinds that do not reveal anything about what is causing what. For example, based on a 1998 study by psychologist John Gottman, then at the University of Washington, and his colleagues showing that people in happy relationships tend to have five times more positive interactions than negative ones, Parker-Pope recommends that when you let someone down, you need to do at least five nice things to make up for it. But in successful relationships, people have far more positive interactions than negative ones; that is where the correlation comes from. Parker-Pope presents no evidence that deliberately moving in the direction of the five-to-one ratio will actually improve a relationship that is failing. My own 30 years of experience as a psychologist suggests that such formulas often fail. When a couple that is struggling leaves a counselor’s office equipped with simplistic advice, efforts to behave more positively often seem fake or forced, and an unhappy partner might even find more to complain about, hoping to push his or her partner into buying more gifts or paying more compliments. A system of this kind can
unravel in days or even hours.
In spite of the upbeat title, the book is also filled with bad news: about the pressures of parenting, recent statistics on cheating (especially by young couples), the weight-gain problem, the toll that snoring takes on marriage (causing one third of couples to sleep in separate beds), and the problem that sexless couples have in rekindling the spark. On the bright side, For Better reminds us that many couples do achieve harmony. Being with the right person from the outset undoubtedly helps—an issue not explored in the book—and so does strong mutual commitment to withstand the challenges that every marriage inevitably faces.
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Add CommentThe answer is so simple you almost expect the clinical researchers to screw it up. We live in the age of the 'me' mentality when marriage is all about the 'we' mentality. Any problems that arise, you see couples arguing and fighting. Each trying to make their own point of view clear, to get their own way. 1) For a happy marrige problems have to be addressed not, me against her, but us against the problem. What resolution works best for us, for the 'we'? Quiet often you find that answer isn't either,what he thought was best for him or she thought best for her, but something else entirely. 2)You wake up each day and commit to loving that person with all your heart and follow through with it. 3) Marriage is often misunderstood as a 50%/50% venture. Wrong. 100%/100% is the goal you shoot for knowing and understanding that it will be the extreem rare time when you actually achieve that. There will be times when you are giving 80% and your partner is only giveing 20%. Pull your 'me' blinders off and recognize the times those numbers are reversed and dont begrudge your partner their down times and dont keep score. 3 steps and you get a happy marriage. Research that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Telrunya got it right and said it right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne thing more to be said though. When the union by marriage takes place (usually) at the height of testosterone driven reproductive age, one has also to lower one's expectation levels of happiness from partner as one ages. After all there are natural hormonal changes that induce changes in the behavioral patterns and these changes in hormones are different for different sexes.
It is unnatural to expect uniformly jolly good times all the time in a marriage union. We have to accept 180 degrees conflicting positions and learn to live with them. A firm commitment in the interest of children and an understanding that the 'level and quality of happiness' will be the same in the long run even by changing the partner are necessary for a stable marriage. Of course there will be cases where a break up is necessary and that need not be regretted.
@Telrunya good post!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thistrying to be one being is hard enough, and trying to be a couple=2 beings acting like one being is even tougher!
I blame the education we have, we do not learn how one could be in harmony with himself as we do learn math and science,
so if its hard to be 'me', harder to be 'us' it's even harder without any preparation or any education on this matters!
I will say you need both, love (a necessary condition but not enough) and will (again, necessary condition but not enough by itself) to make things go forward in a relation.
Without love, oh dear thats an un-tasty boring time, without will/commitment , oh dear that IS painful!
Love is an art that must be taught and practiced from every angle in a society..
Love? We experience love, to some extent from the moment we are born. Some of us feel this emotion strongly and others have to decipher it through the clues that come to them through life. It's a natural emotion like happy or sad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEveryone is willing to do anything as long as they have a strong interest in it or can gain something fullfilling, even if it is a negitive response. Something is gained.
Often, people don't really ask for what they want, yet they really let you know what they don't want.
If you're asking for love and you're giving grief how do you expect to get love?
If you're asking for respect and yelling obscenities then how do you expect to be respected?
Therefore, by giving to the relationship rather then taking from the relationship in return you recieve self respect, self love and create self joy that your partner feels and after you've passed it around then the possibility for it to return is high. If it comes back to you then you are truly loved. If it doesn't then you might want to reconcider your position.
When I stood before my partner and promised that I would "give" to the relationship every day, I spoke with truth and convition.
Promises can only be kept by the person making the promise. To expect someone else to hold their integrety, well, that's placing blame. You can only be accountable for yourself.
In everything give love
Love is easy.... Like, not so much....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople love all kinds of things, a sunset, a puppy, etc...
But how few people do we actually like?
I was married for 17 years to a girl that I have always loved and will always love. The last 2-3 years of that 17 were very painful for me due to a multiplicity of reasons. I read so many books and went to so many courses. I became a much better person in every way and yet the marriage could not be salvaged.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI decided to call it quits. This is despite both of us having post-graduate education, making good money, having two lovely, healthy children. None of us were ever unfaithful to the other and we always helped each other in every way.
We have been separated for two years now. During this time our relationship has improved drastically. The last 6 months we have been best of friends. We go to parties and gatherings with friends together and with our children. We have been on a cruise trip with our children. We have even shared intimate moments again.
And yet neither of us want to be back in a marriage. It is almost perfect as is. We live in two adjacent suburbs, close enough to cover each other for child minding needs but we do not wish to be closer.
We have to ask ourselves, where this notion came that man and wife have to live together under the same roof till death do them apart? Why end a beautiful friendship because a terrible marriage does not work any more?
Yes, our friends and our parents are baffled. But our kids are ok with it and so are we. So why should we think there is anything wrong or missing because the society tells us that "The project of marriage is only ever successful if it terminates with the death of either or both parties" !!! This project is a success once you have raised a good family. Then as the needs of the individuals change, they may pursue the new needs. So many things change in both man and woman, physically, vocationally, socially, spiritually. Neither of them are any longer who they were 20 years earlier. And the hormone need to procreate and build a family is not there. Why ask and expect the couple to stay together despite all these changes and the main need being now irrelevant?
Hope this personal experience helps some people. The relationship and friendship with your loved one, the mother or father of your children can be just as beautiful after marriage as it was in the early years. After all, even if you cannot live together, if you have endeavoured to grow, now you are fuller, richer, human beings and better able to relate in some other ways.
I'd like to mention my own book about this very subject ( Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents, UK 2009) approached from an evolutionary psychology path and considering along with it a taboo subject - astrology. Not the astrology we all know and hate, but a different approach to brain development to include the circadian rhythms both known and proposed. The fact is that we have the most enduring relationships with those like ourselves not just with those that we are attracted to. The human mind has evolved a mechanism for upping its survival rate by acquiring the ability to make profound and enduring mating relationships. If Tara Parker-Hope had consulted me about her marriage before it began, I could have advised her, as I do with many on-line, what to look for. A relationship starts with knowing what we are like. It's too easy to be confused about that self-knowledge when we lack a more useful point of view to look at our social mind and lack a genuine vocabulary to describe what's happening to us we enter a relationship.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMarriage is about a team effort to get through the tough stuff of life -- the work is hard, but the rewards can be great ...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe readers here would enjoy "A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage" --- the bare basics that essential!