Paul Eastwick, professor of psychology at UC Davis, has been studying the science of attraction and relationships for 20 years. Here, the author of Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection and co-host of the podcast Love Factually explains four widespread myths about marriage and what we can learn from them.
Research on close relationships only really took off in the late 80s and the 90s, so it’s a fairly young science compared to other fields. We know that when our relationships are going well, they can be one of the biggest sources of joy and support in our lives, but this topic is also one of the biggest sources of nonsense on the internet. Either the science is misinterpreted or people completely invent garbage.
Some of the most common myths about marriage stem from outdated evolutionary psychology theories, while others are old-fashioned gendered ideas that have been disproven by modern science. Unfortunately, it is remarkably hard to persuade people that the explanation they have come to understand is not supported by research, especially when they’ve spent a long time perusing the internet for evidence to confirm what they believe.
Most people aren’t going to change their minds overnight, but they could benefit a lot if they did. Research shows that relationships have a huge effect on people’s health and wellbeing – and those effects often dwarf the stuff that we sink a lot of money into and spend a lot of time talking about, like smoking and obesity. Challenging those long-held beliefs could improve – or even save – your marriage.
These are four widely held myths about marriage that have been debunked by science.
1. You have to be completely compatible with someone to make a marriage work
This is the idea that there needs to be a match between the traits, attributes and values that each spouse brings to the table. For example, if you see yourself as an adventurous, exciting and intelligent person, you might think you can only be happy with a partner who is the same.
Scientists have tested different versions of this hypothesis for many decades, looking at things like shared values, activities and hobbies. You can measure all these different metrics of matching, and ultimately they don’t predict very much at all about relationship success.
We know that compatibility is important in the sense that not everybody is a good fit for everybody, but compatibility has a lot more to do with the way two people construct their relationship in the first place. Rather than a perfectly constructed team, it’s more like two kids playing in a sandbox, working together to try and build something with no blueprint.
Research even shows that having opposing political views – say, if one spouse is a Tory and the other a real Labour lefty – isn’t correlated with relationship dissatisfaction. Those couples just decide, “We’re not going to talk about that.”
2. To fix a marriage, you need to fix your spouse
A lot of people won’t want to hear this, but I think therapists will echo it too. When couples go to therapy, they often go in with the assumption that the therapist will “fix” their partner. They feel sure that when they talk about the conflict, the independent party is going to side with them. But, surprise, surprise, therapists usually have a way of finding that issues need to be worked on on both sides.
There’s a deeper myth here: that relationships go badly because some people have attributes that make their partners miserable, and these people need to have their traits fixed for them to be good relationship partners. I’m not saying that this never happens, or that it wouldn’t be worth fixing someone who is a narcissistic jerk. But as an explanation for why relationships go badly, it tends to be among the weakest. It misunderstands the locus of the problem.
This is where therapists are coming from. They say, “Rather than trying to fix this person so you’re happier with them, we’re going to work on your dynamic.” In many cases, it’s better to work on the relationship, or even work on yourself first with individual therapy. That’s a good starting point most of the time.
3. Women trade off their physical attractiveness to land a rich husband
This was a pretty popular evolutionary psychological idea rooted in a classic study from 1969, which found that when women rated the qualities they want a partner, they cared about ambition and earning potential more than men, while men said they cared about attractiveness more than money.
The problem is, the researchers didn’t even assess whether the guys were hot and whether the women had money. When sociologists figured this out and started asking men and women the same questions, lo and behold, they found no gender difference. Sometimes people trade money for attractiveness or attractiveness for money, but there’s no gender difference in this sort of marriage trade-off, and no impact on your relationship happiness later down the line.
It’s similar to the manosphere idea of “high-value” men and women. Having a healthy relationship where two people are deeply in love with each other and support each other has very little to do with any of that “value” stuff to do with money or looks.
4. A marriage can survive as its own island if the couple is strong enough
This may not come as a surprise to a lot of people in, say, the collectivist cultures of Asia, but for Westerners, this myth reflects a common individualist approach, the idea that it’s “us against the world”. That if a marriage is strong, it will survive, but if it fails, it’s because the people were weak.
What this myth underestimates is the power of context and what’s going on around a particular couple. Many times, stress, and whether or not a couple is supported by their broader community, can have a huge impact on whether or not a relationship survives.
It’s related to some broader ideas in social psychology. For example, if a marriage ends in divorce, outsiders often look at that marriage and say things like, “They did something wrong, they screwed up, they didn’t have what it took, they didn’t try hard enough”. We may fail to see the context around them, the stress that they were under. Those aspects can end up being invisible to outsiders, so we overattribute failure to the people in the relationship.
Couples often let their broader social networks go if they’re stressed or they’ve got all going on. While it is important to tend to your relationship, keeping other people around and involved is a really good idea as well.
Equally, it’s a good social psychology lesson to keep our own judgments about other people in check. It’s really easy for us to miss the context, so try not to overdo it with the personal attribution. As told to Katie Wright
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