The recent announcement that divorce laws are to be relaxed is a welcome one.
Most couples who get married hope to live happily ever after, yet the brutal reality is that more than 40 per cent of modern marriages end in divorce.
In that case, why make getting divorced more difficult and stressful than it has to be? Fortunately, there are scientifically proven ways to protect your relationship.
I met my wife, Clare, at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School in September 1980, when we both started our medical training.
One of the more surprising ways of predicting whether a couple will stay married is by studying the way they smile
Spookily enough it was the Dean of the Royal Free who first predicted that we would get married. Or rather, at the start of the course, he told a room full of first-year medical students (which included the two of us) that based on what had happened to previous groups of students, four of us in that room would marry. He was spot-on.
But could he or anyone else have predicted that not only would we get married but we would stay happily married?
Over the past 30 years psychologists have put a lot of time and resource into trying to predict which unions are likely to last, and which are likely to end in divorce. They have also identified the things couples should work on if they want to stay happily together.
YOU STAY MARRIED LONGER IF YOUR SMILES ARE GENUINE
One of the more surprising ways of predicting whether a couple will stay married is by studying the way they smile – because it turns out it can be a real giveaway about your true feelings. There are basically two types of smile, a genuine one and a fake one. The genuine one, called the Duchenne smile, is named after a French doctor who 200 years ago studied facial expressions.
A Duchenne smile involves the contraction of two sets of muscles: the zygomaticus major, which raises the corners of your mouth, and the orbicularis occuli, the ring of muscle around your eye sockets. A genuine smile activates both, so that the corners of your mouth turn up and your eyes crinkle.
A fake ‘Say Cheese’ smile, on the other hand, normally just involves the zygomaticus major, which, unlike the orbicularis occuli, is under voluntary control.
Based on studying smiles, psychologists have created something called FACS, the Facial Coding System, which they use to measure the intensity and genuineness of a smile. So what does this have to do with marriage? Well, in a study done in 2001, psychologists from the University of California asked a group of women, then in their 50s, to fill in questionnaires about their relationships and how happy they were with life.
There are basically two types of smile, a genuine one and a fake one. The genuine one involves the contraction of two sets of muscles which raise the corners of your mouth and the ring of muscle around your eye sockets
The psychologists also analysed photos of these same women when they were aged 21, and rated them using the FACS. The women who smiled most naturally in the pictures taken 30 years earlier were far more likely to have got married and stayed happily married than those whose smiles were more obviously false.
A later series of studies, involving men and women, again found a strong link: those who smiled least convincingly in old photos, compared to those who smiled most naturally, were five times more likely to be divorced at some point in their life.
The lead researcher, psychologist Professor Matthew Hertenstein at DePauw University in Indiana, thinks it could be because ‘smiling people attract other happier people, and the combination may lead to a greater likelihood of a long-lasting marriage.’
THE FOUR
