To Sum It All Up: Love, Honor and Cherish

On Wednesday, our Guy Chronicler, Chris Erskine, reacted to a study of when marriages work and when they don’t. Today, Sandy Banks checks it out from the distaff side:

It took six years, thousands of hours of research and 130 newlywed couples willing to put their personal lives under a microscope to lead psychologists to a conclusion that sounds like something from a Henny Youngman monologue.

Marriage works best when a husband listens to his wife . . . and does what she says. When a wife doesn’t whine or nag to get what she wants. When both partners find ways to laugh at themselves, and each other, to sidestep a fight.

The findings “shocked and surprised” the researchers--who expected more complicated theories of marital harmony--and provided grist for comics and columnists nationwide.

But then I stopped laughing and started thinking about the happy couples I know--folks like my neighbors Bill and Allie, who have 40 years of marriage under their belts and still take moonlight walks together each night.

And I realized they’re living the study’s bottom line: Marry somebody you like and respect, and treat them as you would a treasured friend.

*

The 16-page study, by University of Washington psychologists, is not easy to wade through, with its obtuse references to “process models of marriage”--like “negative start-up” and “de-escalation”--which reduce the conversations of couples to mathematical equations, logged via the “Marital Interaction Coding System” onto the “Spouse Observation Checklist.”

But through the magic of science, the researchers were able to predict--with more than 80% accuracy--which couples would divorce in six years, which would create happy, stable marriages and which would wind up with marriages that were stable but unhappy.

Their conclusions, untranslated, sound something like this:

“Furthermore, we found support for the hypothesis that positive affect and de-escalation are predictive of positive outcomes in the marriage to the extent that the positive affect or de-escalation involved the physiological soothing of the male . . . “

In other words, if, in the midst of an argument, you can get the guy to calm down, you might be able to work things out.

Some of their findings seem to restate the obvious:

“Contempt, belligerence and defensiveness [are] destructive patterns during conflict resolution.”

“Sadness, anger [and] whining” will not make points with an angry spouse.

And “humor and affection need to occur naturally, particularly in the context of conflict resolution. The admonition to be funny or to enjoy a partner’s attempts at humor are probably self-destructive mechanisms.”

But other findings are more of a surprise.

Neither a husband’s nor a wife’s anger was predictive of either divorce or marital harmony.

And so-called “active listening”--summarizing and validating your partner’s feelings, as in “Sounds like you’re pretty angry that I blew the grocery money in Vegas”--is scarcely used by happy couples, though it’s a key technique marriage counselors employ.

*

Counseling couples with failing marriages is sort of like “being called to a fire that’s well under way, handed a garden hose and told to put this thing out,” says psychologist Herb Robinson, of the nonprofit Munger Center for Psychological Services in Hollywood.

Sometimes you can help couples find their way out; sometimes you’re stuck watching it burn.

Scientific calculations aside, he says, there’s no one formula for wedded bliss.

And some favorable elements are impervious to therapeutic intervention, like a dogged commitment to make the marriage work, and the good fortune (owing generally to a stable background and high self-esteem) to choose a partner who treats you well.

But in the main, Robinson said, “Marriage is hard work . . . and we come to it carrying a lot of hurt, a lot of expectations.”

And while his advice doesn’t come from a textbook or research project, I think it makes a lot of sense:

“Every now and then, you need to look across the table and remind yourself of the burdens that person is carrying--whether it’s running from school to Little League to grocery shopping, or paying the mortgage and helping with homework and keeping the lawn mower running.

“Develop an appreciation for what they do . . . and what would be missing in your life if that person wasn’t there. And try to express more appreciation than dissatisfaction.”

And if you can create a haven of safety in a world that can be cruel and demanding and overwhelming, then giving in to what your wife wants or soothing your husband when he starts to yell won’t seem like such a sacrifice. Or a joke.

* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.