Law Students

Mathematical Secret to a Happy Marriage?

By Athar Khan

I’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?

Full post as published by Atharkhan on August 27, 2008 (boomark / email).