Ask an elderly couple what the secret is to a long marriage, and you’ll probably get a bunch of different and quite varied responses.
According to a couple of studies, one thing that can help out is enjoying a glass of alcohol together once in a while.
In a free research paper published by Oxford Academic, titled “Drinking Patterns Among Older Couples: Longitudinal Associations with Negative Marital Quality” in a series of gerontology research journals, it is stated that couples who drink alcohol together are much more likely to have a positive sense of feeling to their relationship over time.
As it turns out, the difference is especially noticeable for wives – it looks like being able to enjoy a drink together is a pretty notable factor for happiness in a longer relationship.
In short, the study mentions that couples aged over 50 have happier and longer marriages, if either both partners drink alcohol – or if both partners don’t drink at all. In other words, whether it’s all or nothing for both, marital happiness was larger in the population pool tested than couples where only one of the two partners were drinking.
“Wives who reported drinking alcohol reported decreased negative marital quality over time when husbands also reported drinking and increased negative marital quality over time when husbands reported not drinking,” the study concludes.
The study itself was quite broad in terms of the number of people tested. Almost 5,000 people participated, 2757 couples to be exact. On average, they have been together for 33 years and the vast majority of them only married once.
The questions were quite simple. The couples were asked individually how many times they would enjoy a drink per week, as well as the amount. One of the next questions asked was if they felt if their significant other was “irritating, critical or too demanding.”
Why does the study focus more on the negative things, you might ask? Another research paper has shown that these negative aspects of relationships are generally more associated with health and wellbeing, why is why the gerontology researchers chose to ask these specific questions.
When Reuters heard about the results, they consulted with Dr. Kira Birditt who works at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, to get her take on the study.
“We’re not sure why this is happening,” she says, “but it could be that couples that do more leisure time activities together have better marital quality.”
“The study shows that it’s not about how much they’re drinking, it’s about whether they drink at all.”
Of course, there are exceptions. Almost twenty percent of the men tested in the study and 6 percent of women have admitted to having significant drinking issues, which seems to be especially common with the baby boomer generation.
Nonetheless, the effect of alcohol in a relationship surely is an interesting study. Cheers to that!
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