You might have heard of the orange peel test or the Dorito theory when it comes to figuring out how well your relationship is going.
But a 2022 Stanford University study found that something a little more intangible may predict marital bliss.
The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said that “demographic and personality measures” are “unreliable predictors of marital satisfaction,” but that happily-married couples pretty reliably showed high levels of something called “neural synchronisation.”
What’s neural synchronisation?
It’s basically being on the same wavelength ― thinking or feeling the same thing as your partner on what feels like an instinctual level. Under an fMRI scan, for instance, the brains of couples who were experiencing neural synchronisation were activated in the same areas.
While you might be thinking (as I was) that you and your partner have very different preferences, the study ― which measured neural synchronisation among couples who were watching both marriage-related movie scenes and unrelated objects ― says that how you think about relationships matters most.
Couples who reported the highest levels of happiness were strongly matched in their reactions to the relationship-related clips but did not show the same reactions to one another when looking at unrelated objects.
Speaking to Medical News Today, Dr. Jared Heathman, a board-certified psychiatrist, said of the findings: “Although both partners are in sync about marriage, they may have different views and perspectives on some various topics, thus explaining why they did not have similar brain activity when viewing non-relationship related images.”
Romance isn’t the only area where the synchronisation mattered
Aside from thinking and feeling more or less the same thing about sappy movie scenes, couples who were in sync when they were “switched off” tended to be happier in their marriage, study author Vinod Menon shared on Stanford’s site.
He said that the study found that synchronisation among happily married couples was particularly high in areas of the brain that scientists collectively call the “default mode network.”
“This is the system that your brain defaults to when you’re at rest, and is suppressed when you’re engaged in a challenging cognitive task like remembering a long string of numbers or solving a math problem,” he shared.
Though Menon says “We don’t know whether there is selection based behaviours arising from similar brain activity in a relationship, or whether couples evolve over time to develop similar anticipatory and predictive brain representations,” it seems that being on the same wavelength was a far more consistent marker of happy marriages than personality tests in their study.