Hi all,
Update: I have also started writing smaller posts on Threads.
If you are a young adult like me, chances are your friends are sometimes discussing romantic relationships in your circle & how to succeed in finding one that will last. Sometimes it’s asking for advice & sometimes it’s giving them. As matters of the heart usually go, those pieces of advice aren’t always implemented but we still give & seek them anyway. What I noticed is the advice is generally always anecdotal & I was wondering if there was data-driven research on this.
And that’s when my friend suggested this book to me called “The Science of happily ever after” by Dr. Ty Tashiro. It’s a fun read & I will try to summarize what I learned below about finding loving long-term relationships (used synonymously with marriages). For more nuance & details, you can read the book.
The book starts with the statistics that in the Western world only 30% of couples live happily ever after as 50% of marriages end in divorce, ~10-15% are separated without divorce, & ~7% go along with a self-reported unhappy marriage.
Why does that happen? The author claims it’s because we are very bad at filtering for the right factors that lead to lasting happy & loving relationships.
We can realistically only pick 3 factors & he uses some basic statistics to justify this. If we are filtering for let’s say top 10% across 3 factors (beauty, wealth, height, or any other factor) & if we assume a normal distribution in the population that we can form romantic partnerships with, only 1 out of 1000 people will meet our requirements (0.1^3). Adding 1 more factor will give us even lower chances. So statistically, 3 factors are what we will get to be picky about max.
The issue is, according to the author, we heavily prioritize factors that have no correlation with lasting happy relationships. According to the data & research, he showed (from Professor Norman Li from U of Texas), generally, women pick mates primarily based on social status, followed by kindness. Men generally pick mates based on physical attractiveness, followed by kindness.
Studies cited in the book have shown physical attractiveness to have no correlation with the chances of a lasting happy relationship. Social status, measured mostly by wealth/income has no strong positive correlation either, as long as you are not in the ~bottom 40%. Kindness is a somewhat better indicator, but we don’t prioritize it nearly as much as the other 2 factors mentioned above.
The argument is as we prioritize the factors that don’t matter as much, we get worse draws in other factors by probability as they tend to not be correlated with each other & that might lead to unhappy relationships that don’t last.
The author suggests selecting other factors, primarily personality traits, because these traits mostly remain unchanged throughout life, some of them are strongly correlated with lasting happy relationships, & they are easily detectable early in the relationship, especially by your friends & family with surprising accuracy (in a study, even random strangers could predict with ~85% accuracy whether a marriage will last > 5 years based on the couples’ 10-minute interactions).
According to his data or research, the ideal partner for a lasting happy relationship is very less likely to have 3 personality traits: high neuroticism, high novelty-seeking behavior, and low agreeableness (definition of the personality traits). These traits can be linked to turbulent relationships & infidelity as well.
So, the author advised us to look out for these 3 traits while filtering instead of other factors, if we want to maximize our chances of a happy lasting relationship. If you are not having a positive:negative interaction rate that’s close to 5:1 with your partner, you might want to look closer for these traits.
A secure attachment style is also a good predictor of a happy relationship. Insecure attachment causes conflicts during interactions and leads to lower relationship quality. Avoidant attachment causes lower connectedness and hence, lower relationship quality.
I hope this was educational or at least fun to read. It’s hard, often unreasonable to lead a social life solely based on numbers & probabilities. I can imagine that success in real-life relationships is much more nuanced & harder to predict than data might imply & I have definitely seen success in scenarios that the book will predict a failure.
From what I have seen with matters of the heart with friends, we usually go by the “the heart wants what it wants” mindset, & while we will find ourselves mostly agreeing with data-driven advice, we will still probably dismiss it in practice. Even then, I thought it was an interesting & insightful read that’s worthy to be shared.
Stay rational, sometimes,
Seeam
If you want to hear the author talk about the book’s summary, listen to this: