Go with your Gut: Newlyweds can Sense Wedded Bliss, Unhappy Marriage

Did you get cold feet days before your wedding?

A recent study notes that some potential newlyweds may be aware of just how happy their marriage will or won't be based on a gut reaction.

According to researchers from Florida State University, study authors looked at 135 heterosexual couples who had been married for less than six months. They then followed up with them every six months for a four-year period.

Study authors found that the feelings that study participants verbalized regarding marriages were often unrelated to changes in their marital happiness over time. In fact, it showed that gut-level negative evaluations of partners were easily revealed during a baseline experiment regarding future happiness.

"Although they may be largely unwilling or unable to verbalize them, people's automatic evaluations of their partners predict one of the most important outcomes of their lives - the trajectory of their marital satisfaction," the researchers note, via a press release.

In the study, researchers identified two important findings: people's conscious attitudes that did not always reflect the decisions of their decisions regarding marriage, and gut-level feelings that could actually predict how happy they remained over time.

"Everyone wants to be in a good marriage," associate Professor of Psychology James K. McNulty  said, via the release. "And in the beginning, many people are able to convince themselves of that at a conscious level. But these automatic, gut-level responses are less influenced by what people want to think. You can't make yourself have a positive response through a lot of wishful thinking."

For the study, researchers asked participants to report their relationship satisfaction and the severity of relationship problems. Particpants were also asked to provide conscious evaluations regarding their marriage according to 15 pairs of opposing adjectives, such as "good" or "bad," "satisfied" or "unsatisfied."

When researchers flashed a picture of the participant's spouse along with either positive or negative words, individuals had to simply press a key on the keyboard to indicate whether the word was positive or negative. Special software was used to determine the reaction time.

"It's generally an easy task, but flashing a picture of their spouse makes people faster or slower depending on their automatic attitude toward the spouse," McNulty said. "People who have really positive feelings about their partners are very quick to indicate that words like 'awesome' are positive words and very slow to indicate that words like 'awful' are negative words."

"I think the findings suggest that people may want to attend a little bit to their gut," McNulty said. "If they can sense that their gut is telling them that there is a problem, then they might benefit from exploring that, maybe even with a professional marriage counselor."

More information regarding the study can be found via the journal Science.