A love meter to test your shaadi’s success rate!
For the longest time, we have believed that the extent to which couples keep their wedding vows determines the success of their marriage and their personal levels of happiness and satisfaction. However, as an increasing number of marriages fall apart, not just in the more liberal West but also in relatively conservative societies such as in India, perhaps some of that traditional wisdom has come under a cloud. While previously it was a given that marriage meant a commitment of a lifetime, today it is increasingly viewed as a gamble or a high-risk investment that may or may not pay off.
So, if you worried about how long your relationship will last, worry no more: Scientists have come up with a ‘love test' of sorts that seeks to predict whether an individual will be happy in his or her marriage. The test is based on what can be best described as a gut reaction. Newly-weds are shown a photograph of their partner and immediately asked to identify certain words as either positive or negative. The amount of time they take to respond is noted. According to the test, those who take longer (the difference of even a few milliseconds matters) to identify negative words, for instance ‘scary' and ‘horrible', as such, or are quick to pick up on the positive words such as ‘awesome', will probably be happy in their marriages, and vice versa. Researchers at Florida State University tested more than a 100 couples soon after their nuptials and monitored them for four years, and found that their hypothesis holds strong. The experiment works on the principle of association — that seeing your partner's photograph either puts you in a positive or a negative state of mind. Then, if you are in a positive mind-frame when you take the test, you quickly pick up on the good words while it takes a little longer to register the bad words, since the brain has to change gears, so to say. Similarly, if you instinctively associate your partner with negativity (even when you are in the honeymoon phase of your marriage or are superficially happy) then the brain will take longer to respond to the positive words during the test. In effect, the experiment seeks to map your intuitive reaction to your partner.
While the idea of such a test that can eventually calculate the success rate of a marriage — researchers have warned that the love meter is still not ready for prediction purposes but it merely reflects a trend — may seem novel, it essentially works on the ‘follow your heart' philosophy, clichéd as that may be. It also means that every time, someone who has recently ended a bad relationship or a broken marriage, says that somewhere deep down he or she always knew that it was not meant to be, we should be careful not to write it off as the benefits of hindsight. But having said this and having acknowledged the value of that special connect with your partner, it is also true that if you want your marriage to be a commitment of a lifetime, you renew your vows on a daily basis.