A quick hack to predict whether the two of you will marry…
Wednesday August 2, 2023.
Can a thought experiment indicate if wedding bells will sound in your future?
Research shows that, when looking back, humans who eventually marry are able to accurately recall the narratives describing their relational rough patches and good times. That’s because satisfied couples have no reason to avoid acknowledging the ups and downs of the past… as long as feel like they are positively moving forward together now.
However, humans with poor relationships have distorted narratives that clash with the objective truth of the situation.
Defensive misremembering is a shallow shield in a failing relationship.
Lead author, Brian G. Ogolsky, discussed the findings:
“People like to feel that they’re making progress as a couple.
If they’re not — if, in fact, the relationship is in trouble — they may have distorted recollections that help them feel like they’re moving forward because they need a psychological justification to stay in the relationship.”
How the study was conducted
The results come from a nine-month study involving 232 heterosexual couples who had been dating for approximately two years.
All of the study subjects evaluated their chances of eventual marriage every month, for 8 continuous months.
The 3 groups
Three groups of couples emerged from the study:
Humans whose relationships were getting worse.
Humans whose relationship was stable and unchanged.
Humans who relationship was improving.
Professor Ogolsky said that those whose relationships were improving had remarkably accurate memories:
“Couples who had deepened their commitment remembered their relationship history almost perfectly.
The graphs for this group were really interesting because the plot of the end-of-study recollection could be placed right on top of the one we had graphed from the monthly check-ins.”
Amazingly, humans with stable and unchanged relationships, fooled themselves a little to hijack the feeling of relatiinal growth, said Professor Ogolsky:
“They had given themselves some room to grow and remembered the recent past as better than they had reported it being.
If they saw maintenance as stagnation, that’s a way of addressing that cognitive gap.
It helps them feel that their relationship is developing in some way — that they’re making progress.”
Lastly, those humans with chaotic relationships on-off, or in negative sentiment override, were the most in denial, Professor Ogolsky said:
“If we looked at their history as they reported it to us over the nine-month period, we could see that their chances of marriage were plummeting.
Yet their recollection was that things had been going okay.
Of course, they hadn’t seen the graph so they didn’t know their trajectory looks this dire, but it’s fair to say they were in denial about the state of their relationship.”
The key finding here is the accuracy of human memory depends upon the felt sense of the relationship history, which has direct implications for relationship outcomes. That’s why a good couples therapist will not only notice the story… they will also heed carefully how you tell it.
RESEARCH:
A comparison of concurrent and retrospective trajectories of commitment to wed
BRIAN G. OGOLSKY, CATHERINE A. SURRA
First published: 04 November 2014
