One Way To A Happier Marriage: Get Older

Some new studies confirm earlier research showing that middle age is the least happy time for marriages ... but they often improve with age.

A team at the University of Utah found that as couples age, they perceive their partner's behavior to be less negative than middle-aged couples. They monitored the interactions of married couples and found that "Older individuals reported higher marital satisfaction and perceived their spouse's behavior as less negative in general and more positive across all contexts than middle-aged individuals."

Earlier research looked at conflict resolution strategies and reached a similar conclusion: marital disagreements (OK, you can call them 'fights') becomes less emotional and more affectionate with age.

University of California researcher Cenita Kupperbusch offers another reason marriages are better after middle age. She told the radio show "Science Today" that "There is a trend for older couples to report slightly higher levels of marital satisfaction as they moved into old age and that was not the case for the middle-aged group. Part of the reason marital satisfaction increases as people move from the stage when they've got kids out of the home and they've moved into retirement is that they've got less things to be having troubles over." She believes that the mid-life low point is linked to the child-raising years, when couples have much to disagree about. That ties to work in the 1980s that found that childless women were more happy in their marriages than women with children.

Another group at Berkeley found that "Compared with middle-aged marriages, older couples evidenced (a) reduced potential for conflict and greater potential for pleasure in several areas (including children), (b) equivalent levels of overall mental and physical health, and (c) lesser gender differences in sources of pleasure."

Besides the absence of children, retirement or reduction in work-related stress is also thought to reduce sources of conflict.

Can't wait until you're older? Sounds like get away from sources of conflict -- take a vacation without the kids! Although then there's the question of where to go, where to stay ... on the other hand, you just may want to wait a few years.

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Another benefit of marriage, post-middle-age, is that spouses are memory aids. Research has shown that older couples use collaboration as a strategy to recall as much information as young married couples or individuals. Science News reported that "Elderly partners ... offer the most insights and commentary about passages, while making the fewest errors in recall." New work by some of the same researchers at the University of Utah confirms and extends those earlier findings.