Quickie: Do Women Determine the Overall Happiness of a Relationship?
Examining the ‘happy wife, happy life’ mantra
We’ve all heard the phrase “happy wife, happy life” and many people approach their relationships with this idea in mind. However, is this really the key to relationship satisfaction?
A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says it isn’t.
Researcher Amy Muise and her colleagues looked at the extent to which men and women are satisfied in their relationship, and whose happiness takes precedence. To do this, the group of researchers from around the world analyzed 50,000 relationship-satisfaction reports found in various studies. One study looked at 29,541 daily relationship-satisfaction reports of 901 couples over a three-week period, while another analyzed 3,405 reports of couples that were submitted for five years.
After looking at all of this data, researchers concluded that the key to relationship satisfaction is in the hands of both partners, and instead of the “happy wife, happy life” paradigm that some men and women may have adopted, a better mantra would be “happy spouse, happy house.”
“We found that men’s and women’s relationship satisfaction were equally strong predictors of their own, and their partner’s, next-day and…
