Gut feel may be best predictor of marital bliss

A new study has revealed 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 an unhappy marriage.

Associate Professor of Psychology James K. McNulty from Florida State University and his colleagues studied 135 heterosexual couples who had been married for less than six months and then followed up with them every six months over a four-year period.

They found that the feelings the study 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," the researchers said.

The study outlined two important findings. First, people's conscious attitudes, or how they said they felt, did not always reflect their gut-level or automatic feelings about their marriage.

Second, it was the gut-level feelings, not their conscious ones, that actually predicted how happy they remained over time.

McNulty said that everyone wants to be in a good marriage and in the beginning, many people are able to convince themselves of that at a conscious level. But these automatic, gut-level responses are less influenced by what people want to think. You can't make yourself have a positive response through a lot of wishful thinking.

McNulty said the study suggested that people may want to attend a little bit to their gut. 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 counsellor.

The study is published in the journal Science.