By Carol Church, Writer, Family Album
Reviewed by Victor Harris, PhD, Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences, University of Florida
Quick! Who’s happier in your marriage—you, or your spouse? Oh, you might say, we’d probably both rate it about the same. Don’t be too sure about that. Depending on your age and how long you’ve been married, the chances are actually pretty good that your assessments won’t be that similar.
That’s just one finding in a recent study in the Journal of Marriage and Family that’s been getting some attention in the news lately, thanks in part to many people reading it as an endorsement of the old saying “Happy wife—happy life.”
The actual research, however, is a bit more complex. In this study, about 350 couples over age 50 were asked about their marital satisfaction and overall life satisfaction. On average, these partners had been married for 38 years…quite a while.
As previously mentioned, within couples, men’s and women’s assessments of their marriages (on a scale of 1 to 4) weren’t necessarily all that similar. On the whole, for instance, men tended to rate their marriages a bit more highly than women. In general, as we might expect, people who were happier in their marriages were more likely to report high satisfaction with life.
But here’s where the findings got interesting. The researchers wanted to know how it affects us when our partners are happy in the marriage–even when we aren’t.
So, let’s say someone is pretty dissatisfied with his or her marriage and rates it a 1 out of 4. Yet his or her spouse is apparently quite happy with the marriage, giving it a 4 out of 4. Does this person end up more satisfied with life than someone whose spouse also gives the marriage a low rating? The answer is yes—but this effect was much stronger for the men in the study than the women.
Why would this be? According to the authors, happily married women may offer more active care and support to their spouses than happily married men, thereby improving their husbands’ lives. In fact, some research suggests that older women actually get some of their own marital satisfaction from performing these acts of love and service for their spouses.
So, is it true that a happy wife means a happy life? Maybe in some cases, among older couples—but that might be because these women are actively working to keep their husbands happy!
Ideally, of course, both partners feel positive about their marriage and rate it highly. As researchers remind us, having a high-quality marriage like this protects our general health and emotional well-being…an important benefit, no matter what our age.
(Photo credit: Giant “Happily Ever After” Tag by AForestFrolic. CC BY 2.0. Cropped.)
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