Early in our marriage, I told my wife, P.G. that I wouldn’t be rich. I know she must have thought I was joking. I had graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in marketing, and was on my way to a Master’s in Nonprofit Management. The world was my oyster, well our oyster. But my passion was towards helping people whether it be teens, or couples. What she didn’t realize, I was also helping our marriage too.
A new study by scholars at Brigham Young University looked at more than 1,700 married couples across the U.S. to determine how their attitudes toward money affected their marriages.
Each couple completed a questionnaire which evaluated their relationship and asked, among other things, how much they value “having money and lots of things.” The study, which was just published in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, found that couples who say money is not important to them score about 10% to 15% better on measures of relationship quality, such as marriage stability, than those couples where both or one spouse are materialistic.
In a somewhat surprising twist, the researchers found that those couples in which both partners said they valued lots of money—about 20% of the couples in the study—fared worse than those couples who were mismatched and just had one materialist in the marriage.
“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” said Jason Carroll, a BYU professor of family life and lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”
I may not have riches, but what I do have Luther states so eloquently. A good marriage.
I want to be the one that you just can’t live without
I want to be the one
that you never feel no doubt
I want to be the one that you let give you the lovin’
But, I have nothing
Nothing
I want to be
the one that you always want to be near
I want to say the words that your
body and soul need to hear
I want to be the one that you let give you all the
lovin’
But I have nothing
So Strivers..What will you throw out to Save your Marriage?
iLoveStrong 