21 Minutes to Marital Satisfaction Found From New Writing Exercise at Northwestern University

New studies show that it might just take around twenty minutes to get your marriage where it needs to be.

Marital satisfaction is critical to health and happiness. Unfortunately, it generally declines over time when problems ware on a couple. However, a brief writing intervention has been adopted to provide a more objective outlook on marital conflict that could be the answer to some of life's problems.

Research from Northwestern University shows that a writing intervention, implemented by just three, seven-minute writing exercises administered online, can help prevent couples from losing the romance in their marriage.

"I don't want it to sound like magic, but you can get pretty impressive results with minimal intervention," said Eli Finkel, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at Northwestern in a statement.

The study was composed of 120 couples, with half assigned to the reappraisal intervention and the other not. Every four months for two years, all spouses were required to report their relationship satisfaction, love, intimacy, trust, passion and commitment. They were also required to provide a fact-based summary of the most significant disagreement they had experienced with their spouse in the preceding four months.

The reappraisal writing task asked participants to think about the most recent disagreement with their partner from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved.

Both groups showed decline in the quality of their marital status over the first year, but for the spouses who experienced the reappraisal intervention, meaning they completed the writing exercise three times during the second year, the decline in marital satisfaction had been eliminated.

Although statistics show that couples in the same groups fought just as frequently on severe topics, the intervention couples seemed to be less distressed.

This maybe be critical information, according to Finkel, due to the fact that low marital quality can pose serious health risks, citing data among coronary artery bypass patients in both categories. Those who experienced high marital satisfaction shortly after the surgery were three times more likely to be alive 15 years later than those who did not.

"Marriage tends to be healthy for people, but the quality of the marriage is much more important than its mere existence," Finkel said in a statement. "Having a high-quality marriage is one of the strongest predictors of happiness and health. From that perspective, participating in a seven-minute writing exercise three times a year has to be one of the best investments married people can make."