Communting With Your Partner Could Improve Your Relationship
The most common thing for couples to do is buy a house midway between their two work places to make the commute easier but new research says it could damage your relationship.
The study was carried out by Irene Huang, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and has been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
It showed that couples who travelled in the same direction to work often felt closer to each other.
Lead researcher Irene Huang said, “Couples marital satisfaction can depend on whether they commute to work in the same or different directions.
“Physically moving in a particular goal-relevant direction (e.g. commuting to work) might become associated with more general goal-related concepts.”
The study consisted of two surveys of married working adults, with participants asked how happy they were with their marriage and how satisfied they were with their spouse on a scale of one to nine.
The first involved 280 adults from the US who were 33 and had been married for 8 years on average. The results showed that couples who travelled in the same direction to work often had a higher marital satisfaction.
The results stood independent from outside factors such as having children, how long the couple had been married, income level and how long their commute was.
The study also showed that it did not matter whether the couples left for work at the same time.
A similar study was conducted in Hong Kong which correlated with the results from the US study.
It is thought that the idea of travelling in the same direction replicates the vision of a shared goal in the relationship, resulting in a stronger marriage.
A further study took 80 strangers and paired them together to perform a task. The results showed that they reacted more positively towards each other if they had been walking the same way during the task.
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Cara Mason
tagged in Marriage Relationship