Letters Remain

Tag: marriage

  • Health Effects of Marriage

    There are wide-ranging health benefits to be gained from being happily married, the research suggests, but just how extensive this effect is (and its intricacies) is hugely surprising. In Tara Parker-Pope’s comprehensive look at the physiological effects of marriage, we are told how just by getting couples to discuss a marital disagreement their healing of…

  • A Summary of Happiness Research

    David Brooks brings ‘happiness research’ back to the wider public’s attention with a succinct summary of research into what does and does not make us happy: Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow? […] If you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are…

  • Marriage as Scope Creep

    Even though married life was progressing well and all involved were happy, Elizabeth Weil decided to actively apply herself to “the project of being a spouse” and to document the process. Weil’s article is slow to start but becomes an absorbing inquiry in to what it means to be married. I’ve never really believed that…

  • Choosing a Marriage Partner

    When you’re looking, here are a few tips on choosing a marriage partner to increase your happiness and marriage longevity, from a summary of the research by Eric Barker: There is mutual idealisation: “Spouses who idealized one another were more in love with each other as newlyweds. Longitudinal analyses suggested that spouses were less likely…

  • Ability to Inhibit Prejudices Diminishes with Age

    As we age we become less able to inhibit prejudiced inferences, relying more on ethnic and sexist stereotypes to interpret situations, research into the science of prejudice suggests. There are a lot of clichés thrown around about the elderly, but one that seems to be true—or at least is backed up by research—is the belief…

  • Marriage, Children, and Surnames

    In most countries around the world it is convention that the wife take the husband’s surname at marriage. It is equally conventional for a child to then also take this same name. Evolutionary psychology is the reason behind this phenomenon, as discussed briefly in the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. One of the…

  • How To Destroy a Marriage

    In response to Dr Rob Dobrenski’s article on why marriages fail (linked previously), The Last Psychiatrist looks at various “post-marriage accelerators of divorce”—things you can do today to destroy your marriage (limited time offer): Be contemptuous Bring your work home (emotionally) Rush through your ‘family life’ in order to spend time with yourself Be painfully honest with friends/colleagues…

  • Why Marriages Fail

    Dr Rob Dobrenski of Shrink Talk has an absolutely fantastic post on reasons why marriages fail. These are the seven he felt worthy of note: Marriage requires compatibility not just at the point of saying ‘I do,’ but across the entire life span. Assuming that marriage implies monogamy, the institution itself is counterintuitive to biology.…