Wedding Bliss or Disaster? Your Gut May Reveal the Reality of Marriage

Will you have a happy marriage, or will it end in disaster? It turns out that although newlyweds may not be completely aware of it, they may know whether their march down the aisle will result in wedded bliss or divorce. The findings reveal a little bit more about the commitments involved in marriage, and what makes a happy marriage.

In order to examine marriage a bit more closely, the researchers studied 135 heterosexual couples who had been married for less than six months. They followed up with these couples every six months over a four-year period. In the end, they found that the feelings that the participants verbalized about their marriages were unrelated to changes in their marital happiness over time. Instead, it was the gut-level negative evaluations of their partners that they unknowingly revealed during a baseline experiment that predicted future happiness.

"Although they may be largely unwilling or unable to verbalize them, people's automatic evaluations of their partners predict one of the most important outcomes of their lives--the trajectory of their marital satisfaction," wrote the researchers in a news release.

What were most interesting, though, were the findings that regarded another measure designed to test the couples' automatic attitudes, or gut-level responses. This particular part of the experiment involved flashing a photo of the study participant's spouse on a computer screen for just one-third of a second followed by a positive word or a negative word. The individuals then simply had to press a key on the keyboard to indicate whether the word was positive or negative.

"It's generally an easy task, but flashing a picture of their spouse makes people faster or slower depending on their automatic attitude toward the spouse," said James McNulty, one of the researchers, in a news release. "People who have really positive feelings about their partners are very quick to indicate that words like 'awesome' are positive words and very slow to indicate that words like 'awful' are negative words."

While everyone wants to be in a good marriage, automatic, gut-level responses are less influenced by what people want to think. In other words, people can't make themselves have a positive response through a lot of wishful thinking, no matter if they want to or not.

"I think the findings suggest that people may want to attend a little bit to their gut," said McNulty in a news release. "If they can sense that their gut is telling them that there is a problem, then they might benefit from exploring that, maybe even with a professional marriage counselor."

The findings are published in the journal Science.