Happiness and Choice in Marriage

There is a professor at Harvard by the name of Dan Gilbert who has done a huge amount of research on happiness and whose findings might shed some light on the issues of happiness in marriage. It is something that every married man should know and it goes something like this.
Gilbert reports on two studies that have direct correlation to committed marriage. In one study people were asked to rank order six Monet prints from most liked (1) to least liked (6). They then were told that as participants they could have one of the prints as a gift but unfortunately the researcher only had the 3rd and 4th ranked prints. Of course the people almost invariably picked the third over the fourth. That is not the interesting part. Some time later those same people were again asked to rank the same six prints, and guess what? Their formerly third ranked print came in among the top averaging a little better than second overall. Ad the formerly fourth ranked print fell lower in the pick averaging about fifth. Being stuck with what we think is average changes our perception of our liking of that choice over time. Hmmm!

Here is the second study: Students at Harvard were in a basic photography course where they were taught how to shoot good pictures and then after making a contact sheet of their best efforts were asked to pick their absolute best two. They were then taught all about developing and print-making to give their very best effort to creating two blow-ups of those pictures. Half were then told that they had to choose only one picture to keep and that the other was to be shipped off immediately to research headquarters in England never to be seen by them again. The other half were told that they had four days to reconsider their choice and could swap it out if they wished. The results were rather astounding. The unchangeable group, when surveyed in the short and over the long term, were extremely proud and happy with their picture, while those who had a choice when measured during the four days of consideration, shortly after their final choice point, and over the long haul showed increasing unhappiness and displeasure with their choice!

As an epilogue to his study Gilbert offered students a choice in photography courses in a recent semester; one course where they would have a reversible choice on the pictures they produced and the other where the choice would be final and irreversible. Not too surprisingly, over 66% of the students said that they would prefer to have a choice – or in Gilbert’s words, two thirds of us would prefer conditions in life that would make us miserable!

Translating these research studies to marriage we would contend that if and when you marry with a sense of finality and irreversibility, you actually are producing a greater possibility of happiness than if you hold that you could get divorced if it doesn’t work out. Furthermore, having made that choice, even in the face of the fact that there are other more attractive possibilities out there, the choosing increases the attractiveness of our life partner. How do you like them apples!