Think Good Communication Helps Your Marriage? Think Again.
We're screwed. A new study says says good communication does not lead to marital satisfaction. Say what? It's not quite so grim. What the study found was that it takes more than good communication (duh) to make a marriage successful. "Although communication and satisfaction were correlated, communication wasn’t a good guide for determining partners’ satisfaction with their relationships over time,” says the study’s lead author Justin Lavner, an assistant professor in UGA’s clinical psychology program in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Although communication practices could predict satisfaction to some extent for some couples, the lack of a definitive causal relationship calls for additional attention to other factors that influence marital satisfaction, such as environmental stressors, what activities and interactions a couple has, and the personality traits of the individual partners. "It’s absolutely right to say more satisfied c...