Researchers at Brigham Young University have found after studying some 1,724 married couples in the United States that those that are most materialistic tend to have the least happy marriages. The team has published its results in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy.
The study, led by family life Professor Jason Carroll, sought to correlate financial success, desire for wealth or increased wealth with overall happiness between married couples and the strength of their bond. To that end, they sought volunteers from all over the country, the only stipulation being that the couple had to be heterosexual and married. Once in the study, couples were sent individual questionnaires that they were asked to fill out privately and then return without revealing their answers to their spouse, or anyone else for that matter. The idea was to engender a degree of honesty that they believed would only be gained through complete privacy.
One example of the questions asked was “How much do you value having money and lots of things,” based on a scale of one to ten. Similar questions were asked regarding how they felt about their spouse, the quality of their life and their marriage. Again, volunteers were asked to rate their satisfaction or dissatisfaction on a scale of one to ten so that averages and other statistical measurements could be made.
After the questionnaires were returned, the research team set to crunching the numbers, and one of them they came up with was that couples who reported low numbers when asked how much they valued money and having things, also reported higher numbers (10 to 15 percent) when rating their spouses and marriages than did those who rated having money and things very highly.
Interestingly, the research team also found that couples in marriages where both parties rated money and things highly wound up at the bottom of the pack when rating their satisfaction level with their marriage. Sadly, this group made up approximately twenty percent of all the people that participated in the study. On the other hand, the majority of these couples also reported that they had a pretty high income.
The bottom line, Carroll writes is that “…how these couples perceive their finances seems to be more important to their marital health than their actual financial situation.” And yet, they seem to be unhappier for it. Thus, their perceptions of what they want differ radically from the reality of their actual needs.
It appears that after all these years the Beatles were right all along.