How solid is your m
arriage? If you really want to know, you might try asking two questions:
- How happy are you in your marriage relative to how happy you would be if you weren’t in the marriage? [Much worse; worse; same; better; much better.]
- How do you think your spouse answered that question?
Economists at the University of Virginia, who examined how 4,242 households answered those questions in a 1987-88 wave of the survey, and then again roughly six years later, on average, for the 1992-94 wave, believe the answers can help predict the future of your marriage. A UVA news release reports that only 40.9 percent of couples accurately identified how their spouse would answer the question. That’s right: almost 60 percent of couples had imperfect (asymmetric) information about each other, and roughly a quarter of those had “serious†discrepancies in overall happiness (differing by more than one response category). Why do we care?  Because according to bargaining theory, the more one spouse misjudges his or her partner’s happiness (particularly by overestimating), the more likely he or she will bargain “too hard†and make a marriage-ending mistake. Worried? Read more from the University of Virginia.