If you’re a newlywed, you may be wondering what you can do to keep your marriage alive for years to come. Research has found that there is one easy thing you can do to prevent divorce. Let’s take a closer look at what it is and some suggestions for implementing it into your own marriage.
Lowering Your Risk of Divorce Could Be as Easy as This
A 2013 study conducted by University of Rochester researchers involved providing couples with tools for early marriage intervention.
The findings were surprising: couples who discussed five movies about relationships over the course of one month had an 11% divorce rate at three years of marriage. Couples who didn’t discuss five movies about relationships had a 24% chance of getting divorced after three years.
Although the researchers thought this method would be effective at lowering the divorce rate, they didn’t expect it to be that effective.
Breaking the Study Down Further
The study included 174 newlywed couples. The researchers focused on the first three years of marriage due to a higher risk of conflicts, but some of the couples had been in relationships for up to seven years. It was the first long-term study to investigate the effects of early marriage intervention programs.
The couples were assigned to one of three groups. The first two groups went through weekly lectures, supervised practice sessions, and homework assignments.
The third group watched a 10 minute lecture on how watching couples in movies can help make you more aware of your own constructive and deconstructive behavior in a marriage.
The couples then watched the movie Two for the Road, a rom-com from 1967. They were asked a list of 12 questions about the couples, such as if the couple opened up about their feelings or if they snapped at each other. The couple was also asked to compare the relationship to their own.
They were then sent home with a list of 47 movies to choose from and asked to watch one together every week and discuss the movie later using the same questions.
Although all three of these groups experienced lower divorce rates than the control group (which received no lectures, training, etc.), the couples in the movie and discussion group were the most self-sufficient throughout the study and required less in-person time.
What These Findings Suggest
The study’s findings suggest that most people aren’t completely unaware of the rights and wrongs in a relationship. Most of us know what we need to be doing, but sometimes we need to see examples of what other couples are doing — right and wrong — in order to become more self-aware of our own behavior.
The researchers believe that bringing positive and negative relationship behavior to our attention through movies may work just as effectively as couple’s therapy.
It’s also a much more cost effective option.
Implementing This Tool in the Long-Term
According to the University of Rochester researchers, this tool should be just as effective for couples in long-term marriages who want to strengthen their relationship and lower their risk of divorce.
Although researchers suggest watching a movie and talking about the couple’s issues once a year for long-term couples, you can implement this strategy into your lives as often as you would like. After all, who doesn’t want to watch some good movies?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
