Wifes Happiness is More Crucial to Marital Success Than Husbands, Study Finds By Laura Tedesco, Sep 15, 2014 Turns out, the old adage “happy wife, happy life” is spot on. When a woman is happily married, her husband’s overall life satisfaction gets a boost, regardless of how he feels about their union, according to a new Rutgers University study, published in the October issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family. The researchers analyzed the marital quality and general well-being of 394 couples who’d been married, on average, for 39 years. (To be included, both spouses had to be at least 50 years old, and one at least 60.) Although overall life satisfaction didn’t significantly differ by gender, the men did tend to report slightly higher marital happiness than their wives did. And an unhappy wife spelled serious trouble: When the women didn’t report wedded bliss, their husbands’ overall life contentment tended to take a hit. This was true even when then men weren’t thrilled about the marriage either. Specifically, among husbands who thought their marital quality was “very poor,” those with equally unhappy wives reported a life satisfaction score of only 1.8 out of 6, compared to a 5.4 out of 6 if the unhappily married men’s wives were content in the relationship. By contrast, among women who rated their marriage poorly, overall life satisfaction was only minimally influenced by their husband’s marital happiness. So why is the woman’s contentment so critical? The reason is not the one you may suspect — that a happy wife is one who’s pampered (and therefore doesn’t complain). Quite the opposite, in fact, “if a wife is happy in her marriage, she will try hard to create a positive experience for her husband,” study author Deborah Carr told Yahoo Health. “So perhaps she listens to him more, she offers him more emotional support, or maybe she offers him more help with daily activities.” A satisfied wife may also be more willing to twist the sheets on a more regular basis. “All of those things might make a husband happier in general, even if it doesn’t affect his views of the marriage,” said Carr. Consider the reverse, too: When a woman is unhappy in her marriage, there’s a good chance she’ll let her spouse know. “She is much more likely to talk, to be confrontational, and all of those things might affect the husband,” Carr explained. By contrast, the discontented husband is more likely to “sit and seethe silently,” so his misery might not make much of an impact on his wife. “She might be totally unaware of it,” she said. The age of the couples in the study likely plays a significant role in the findings, since previous generations tended to think it was the woman’s job to set the emotional tone of the marriage. “I think we might see more parallel findings for men and women of the younger generation,” said Carr. “Among people in their 30s and 40s, both men and women were raised to talk about their feelings. Young people today want to marry their soul mate, so the assumption is that you should share your hopes and dreams and passions — and you should put all of these abstract ideas on the table when you’re dating.” Regardless of a couple’s age, Carr thinks her study serves as an important reminder: Communication about the state of your union is critical to your success as a couple. “The correlation between his and her marital appraisals isn’t that high, meaning that one spouse can be happy in a marriage, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that the other is also happy,” she told Yahoo Health.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:42:11 +0000
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