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The secret of domestic bliss?

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A recent study has found that by viewing your partner through rose-tinted spectacles not only is your relationship likely to last longer than if you took a more realistic view, but also you are more inclined to create the relationship you hoped for in the first place. Dale Griffin (COGS) who conducted the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, said the findings challenge the view that couples should be realistic about their partner's faults and accept that there is no such thing as the perfect partner.

According to Dale, the reason for this is that the person who is being idealised will start to live up to the expectations of their partner, thus creating the relationship they had wished for. Although, this does not mean that one should be overly idealistic about their partner, by turning a blind eye to each others' failings, partners are less likely to view each other as incorrigibly flawed human beings and thus become disillusioned with one another. The trick seems to lie in holding a slightly more positive image of one's partner than they hold of themselves.

The study looked at 200 married, or dating couples of any age who had been together for 19 months on average. Dale and his colleagues, Sandra Murray (University of Michigan) and John Holmes (University of Waterloo), looked at how satisfied partners felt in light of how their partner saw them, and then examined how satisfied they were with their relationship a year later - if, of course, they were still together. Dale said the results were clear: "Relationships persisted, satisfaction increased, conflicts were averted, doubts abated and personal insecurities diminished when individuals idealised their partners and their partners idealised them."

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March 7th 1997