How Drinking Habits Can Affect Your Romantic Relationships
This is must-know info for making your marriage a happy one.
Good Housekeeping
By Heather Finn
July 20, 2016
Couples who drink together, stay together… right? According to a new study from The Gerontological Society of America, our suspicions that sharing a cocktail with our spouses is good for our relationship just might be correct.
The study, which surveyed nearly 5,000 married people over the age of 50, found that relationships are happier when both people involved have the same drinking habits. Whether the happy couples were abstaining together or drinking together didn’t matter — all that mattered was that they were both choosing to do the same thing.
“We’re not sure why this is happening,” one of the study’s authors, Dr. Kira Birditt of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told Reuters Health. “But it could be that couples that do more leisure time activities together have better marital quality.”
Makes sense, right?
Interestingly, though, while the study found husbands were more likely to drink than wives, it also found that wives were more likely to have a problem with differing habits. When they drank but their husbands didn’t, wives were more likely to be unhappy with their marriage. Hmm.
Of course, we don’t advocate drastically changing your drinking habits in an effort to improve your relationship (“We’re not suggesting that people should drink more or change the way they drink,” Dr. Birditt told Reuters Health), but hey — now you’ve got the perfect excuse to pop open that bottle of wine with your S.O. tonight.