If you’re in a long-term relationship, whether you’re newlywed or far along the road, you might wonder if it’s got the power to stay alive for the upcoming years.
Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. But guess what? Your very own glasses of perception might just hold the answers you seek.
The key lies in how you perceive yourself and your dynamic as a couple.
Let’s dive into three decades of mind-blowing research on the mysterious nature of marriage to determine if a breakup is on the horizon (or not).
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It’s not about the now, it’s about how you view the relationship
Psychologist John Gottman from the University of Washington has been digging into the psychology of relationships for over 30 years, with a special focus on what’s called “marital cognitions”.
In other words, the thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions we hold about our partner and our marriage.
Researchers have found that your thoughts about your partner’s personality, trustworthiness, and how you view the marriage can influence how you feel and act in the relationship.
It’s like having a special lens that shapes how you see everything.
They call these perceptions “thin slices”, little snippets of your partner and the marriage that you use to make judgments. Like those quick first impressions, you get when you meet someone.
These “thin slices” are pretty powerful. They can predict whether a couple’s marriage will last or not.
In one study, scientists used an Oral History Interview (i.e. a chat about the relationship) to see how couples talked about their bond. Instead of asking for boring old questionnaires, they let the couples tell their stories. The way they remembered the past and talked about each other gave clues about how they’d behave in the future.
The results?
- Researchers can now forecast the stability of a marriage with an impressive 87% accuracy at the 4–6-year mark and still hold strong at 81% accuracy at the 7–9-year point.
- Spouses who had more positive perceptions about their marriage and each other tended to have higher satisfaction and less decline in their relationship.
- If you focus on the negatives consistently, there’s a higher chance the marriage won’t last long.
For newlyweds, those early days of marriage are a time of change and adjustment. Their thoughts about each other and the marriage can be more flexible but as they get more experienced in their relationship, their perceptions might become more solidified or “rigid”.
Why is this important? Well, understanding how we perceive our partners and relationships can help us predict what’s to come. Whether you’re just starting as newlyweds or you’ve been married for years, these “thin slices” of perception can tell a lot about your marriage’s future.
Thus, based on how you talk about your relationship researchers can know how long will the relationship last.
It’s not just about what’s happening now, but how we see and interpret it that can make all the difference.
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How 3 Minutes Can Change Everything
This gets even crazier.
The same psychologist, John Gottman, partnered with her colleague Sybil Carrère, to see if they could predict which marriages stayed together and which got divorced just by watching the first three minutes of a marital conflict discussion.
Could they accurately predict in 3 minutes who would eventually quit the relationship?
The scientists asked 124 couples, who had been married for less than six months and didn’t have kids yet, to have a discussion about a problem they disagreed on. They recorded these couples while they talked about the issue for 15 minutes.
They looked at how positive and negative the couples’ emotions were during the first three minutes of the discussion.
- Positive emotions included things like interest, affection, humor, and joy.
- Negative emotions were things like anger, sadness, disgust, and all that not-so-fun stuff.
The scientists compared the emotions of the couples who stayed happily married for the next six years with those who ended up divorcing.
Turns out, the emotions shown in the first three minutes of the discussion could predict whether the couple would stay together or not.
Couples who later divorced started with more negative emotions and fewer positive emotions during their chat. On the other hand, the couples who stayed together had more positive and less negative interactions from the start.
The lesson?
If you kick off a discussion with your significant others with negative vibes, things might be heading downhill. But if you begin with positive emotions, you stand a better chance of sticking together.
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The silently efficient part of the brain
Deep within our brains lies a remarkable power known as the “adaptive unconscious” that extracts conclusions with lightning speed.
This internal high-speed computer operates silently, enabling us to make rapid decisions based on small chunks of information.
But we tend to distrust this type of fast thought process. Our society values decisions taken with careful consideration. The more time and effort we put into them, the more these decisions will be appreciated by us and others.
- “Rome wasn’t built in a day; let’s give ourselves the time we need to think this through.”
- “We don’t want to act on impulse; we should gather more information first.”
- “It’s better to sleep on it and make an informed decision tomorrow.”
- “We should weigh the pros and cons before jumping to a conclusion.”
Haven’t you heard phrases such as these?
We tend to believe that we’ll get the best results the more info we collect. We only trust our conscious decisions.
But it doesn’t have to be like this.
Psychologist Nalini Ambady shows that people can accurately predict a variety of outcomes by just looking at very brief videos (1s — 20s) such as people’s sexual orientation, salesperson performance, and student evaluations of teachers, among others.
We can form accurate and meaningful judgments about individuals based on very brief observations, just a few seconds long. They’re often derived from nonverbal cues and can provide valuable insights into various aspects of human behavior and social interactions.
So next time you get a first impression feeling, explore it more thoroughly and let it develop before disregarding it as nonsense.
It might save you in the long run.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
