The secret to being happy together

What makes a marriage click? This question is often asked, either outwardly or silently, by people who wish to have a satisfying and successful married life. But, as we know, not all couples get what they wish for. Even equally qualified partners cannot be sure of a happy union.

Many myths abound about the ingredients to a successful marriage. We have various wedding rituals and traditions to make sure that the marriage will work. Fortunately, recent studies have shed new light in this area. And the findings show that the secret to a happy marriage is not necessarily what our parents or grandparents may have once told us. Some data, in fact, directly contradict commonly accepted folk wisdom. Many believe that a very long engagement foretells how happy the couple will be and how long their marriage will last. Not really true. Researchers have found out that compatibility is not as important a factor in a happy marriage as how the couple actually deals with their dissimilarity. In other words, it's how they handle the problems that arise in the marriage. It's either they deal openly with difficult situations and express their feelings respectfully to each other, or they shove problems under the rug.

The idea that people with similar personality traits will have a better marriage has, for many years, been the subject of study. It was believed that if individuals shared the same traits such as "easygoing" or "stubborn" they would get along better as a couple. However, no clear relationship between personality traits and happy marriages was ever found. In fact, the whole notion of "personality traits" has come to be questioned, since people tend to change or develop new traits within the marriage.

One factor that has been found quite indicative of marital success is how well the couple communicated before the marriage. Good communication is one of the cornerstones of a good relationship. The ability to communicate is crucial in working through any problems that may arise during the course of the union. Happily married couples seem to develop their own private language.

Researchers have found that spouses in happy marriages had devised a nonverbal communication line between each other. But husbands in distressed marriages were found to be as poor in understanding clues from their wives as were strangers. The same was also true for more subtle feelings. Wives in happy marriages were aware of stress in their husbands even when it was not readily apparent to others. And unhappy couples tended to be oblivious to the hostility of their spouses although other people around noted it.

One significant factor in marital happiness is the degree of the partners' responsiveness to each other. Researchers on marital relationships have noted that being responsive in sharing the events of the day with one's spouse identified happy couples from unhappy ones. The friendship built up through such day-to-day exchanges appears to make couples willing to go through the difficulties of repairing their relationship when it becomes strained.

Now, finally, the question: Is frequency of sexual activity an ingredient to a happy marriage? Believe it or not, studies - some dating back to the 1930s - have shown little or no relationship at all between frequency of engaging in sex and marital satisfaction. Among happily married couples in one study, frequency ranged from less than once a month to daily. But the great majority seemed to attribute marital happiness to other things than sex.

In the same study, one-third of the men and two-thirds of the women reported a sexual problem such as inability to relax or simply a lack of interest in sexual activity. Yet despite the fact that these couples reported being unhappy with their sex lives, they still felt their marriages were happy ones. So what then is the secret to a happy marriage? There's a simple formula, so simple that you may doubt its efficacy. But it has been distilled from the revelations of hundreds of happily married couples. It's the triple C: caring, concern, communication. If you genuinely care for and are concerned about your spouse, and can communicate this, there is no reason whatsoever why you will not be happy together.