Many committed singles have watched as their married friends became insufferable and boring. But is this really true?
“Why is it there are so many unmarried women in their thirties these days, Bridget?” – the dinner party scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary is excruciatingly familiar to anyone who has ever found themselves, alone, surrounded by a room full of married friends.
While psychologists may not have fully resolved the question of whether marriage makes people self-satisfied like Bridget’s paired-up friends, or if instead smug people are just more likely to get married, research suggests the experience of committing to and settling down with another person really does change our personalities for better and for worse… until death do us part.
It makes sense that it might – after all, publicly binding yourself to another person takes loyalty and forward thinking, not to mention a radical change of lifestyle for some, and of course living day in, day out with the same person requires a certain degree of patience and diplomacy.
Smug married couples beware: while life satisfaction does rise for a while after tying the knot, it usually returns to baseline levels after a year or so (Credit: Alamy)
Whatever the personality changing effects of marriage might be, you’d think the question would be a research priority – around the world, millions of us tie the knot every year.
In fact, research into this question is surprisingly thin on the ground. Probably the best evidence we have comes from a recent German study, in which researchers looked at personality changes among nearly 15,000 people over a period of four years.
It turns out that committed singles like Bridget Jones really are more fun (Credit: Alamy)
Importantly, 664 of the participants tied the knot in the course of the study, allowing Jule Specht at the University of Münster and her colleagues to see how their personalities changed as compared with the rest of the sample who did not get married. The researchers found that wedded participants showed decreases in the traits of extroversion and openness to experience as compared with the others.
This difference was relatively modest, but still, it perhaps provides some concrete evidence to back up the suspicions of single people up and down the land – that their married friends aren’t quite as much fun as they used to be.
Despite the popular myth, married couples don't tend to take on each other's personalities over time (Credit: Getty Images)
The pattern is backed up, at least among women, by an earlier and much smaller US study published in 2000, in which the researchers tested the personalities of just over 2,000 middle-aged participants twice over of a period of between six and nine years.
In that time, 20 of the women married while 29 of them divorced. Relative to those who tied the knot, the divorcees showed increased extroversion and openness, as if freed from the shackles of wedlock. Newly married men, by contrast, showed benefits compared with their divorced peers, scoring higher on conscientiousness and lower in neuroticism.
The conscientiousness boost among married men seems intuitive. Anyone who has been married (or in a long-term committed relationship) will know that it takes certain skills to keep the marital ship afloat through sometimes choppy domestic waters. Surely then, marriage will hone these skills. These are exactly the findings of a new paper published this year.
Married men are more conscientious, even though they occasionally leave their dirty laundry all over the floor (Credit: iStock)
The team of Dutch psychologists, led by Tila Pronk at Tilburg University, reasoned that two of the most important marital skills or traits are self-control (having the ability to bite your tongue for the long-term sake of the marriage) and forgiveness (so that you can get past all those times that your partner errs in some way, be that leaving their clothes on the floor or flirting with the neighbour).
The researchers recruited 199 newlywed couples and, within three months of their wedding, measured how forgiving each partner was (the participants rated their agreement with items like “When my partner wrongs me, my approach is just to forgive and forget”) and their self-control (participants rated their agreement with items like “I am good at resisting temptation”). The participants then repeated these measures each year for four further years.
The results showed that the participants increased in forgiveness and self-control over the course of the study. Statistically speaking, the increases in forgiveness were moderate while the increases in self-control small, but Pronk and his team pointed out that they were equal to the self-control gains seen in people who have completed psychological programmes specifically designed to increase trait self-control.
Psychologists haven't fully resolved the question of whether marriage makes people smug and insufferable (Credit: iStock)
What about that self-satisfied vibe that married couples sometimes give off? The most relevant evidence here comes from studies into how life-satisfaction or happiness changes after marriage. Singletons like the 30-something Bridget Jones will be glad to hear that that while satisfaction does rise for a while after marriage, it usually returns to baseline levels after a year or so.
However, while that’s the overall picture, it may not be true for everyone. We often talk about some people being good husband or wife “material” (while others seem more suited to a life of bachelorhood) and consistent with this view, the evidence suggests that how marriage changes a person’s happiness varies depending on their pre-wedding personality.
