Go with your gut

Marriage can be a challenging business and should not be entered into lightly after sharing a couple of glasses of champagne and some tonsil hockey at your friend’s housewarming party. A lifelong union demands a touch more than alcohol-fuelled delusion as a basis. However, it seems that cool rational thought may not be the answer either. According to a new study when contemplating marital bliss with another your best resource is your gut feeling.

For the study the researchers asked 135 heterosexual couples who had been married less than six months to answer questions about their relationship. The individuals were asked to report their relationship satisfaction and the nature and degree of their relationship problems. The conscious attitudes of the participants toward their relationship were also assessed by asking them to choose adjectives to describe their relationship from opposing pairs such as “good” or “bad” and “satisfied” or “unsatisfied”.

That was fine as far as establishing the participants’ conscious attitudes but the researchers wanted to establish their gut feelings, or unconscious attitudes, as well. To do this they flashed a photo of the participant’s partner on a computer screen for one third of a second followed by a positive word like “awesome” or “terrific” or a negative word such as “awful” or “terrible”. The participants then had to press a key on a keyboard to indicate whether the word was positive or negative.

It has been established that people who have a positive about their spouse are quick to recognise positive words but slower to recognise negative words. Similarly people with a negative attitude are quick to identify negative words but slower to identify positive words.

So having established the conscious and unconscious attitudes of the individuals the researchers then charted the course of the couples’ relationships over the following years.

The results showed that what the individuals consciously said had no relationship to their marital happiness over time. However, people who had the most negative or even lukewarm unconscious attitudes reported the lowest levels of marital satisfaction four years later.

Nobody wants an unhappy marriage of course, so it is no surprise that conscious utterances align with that ambition. It seems though, that gut feelings are a more accurate indicator of what will actually happen in the marriage. Perhaps, as far as romantic utterances go, “I love you with all my heart” could be more meaningfully replaced by “I love you with all my gut”?