Materialistic couples may work better in the matter of money but when it comes to their marriage they are more likely to be less successful.
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Green papers may help stabilizing a family but new findings recall the old saying that money is not everything.
A new research by a Brigham Young University team suggests that materialist couples have unhappier marriages compared to those who don't care much about money and possessions.
Researchers evaluated relationships of more than 1,700 married couples across the US. The participants were asked how much value they placed on "having money and lots of things."
Findings showed that 14 percent of couples were made up of two non-materialists, about 11 percent had the wife self-reported as highly materialistic while the husband was not, about 14 percent were the reverse and in 20 percent both sides were materialists. The rest of the studied couples fell into the middle ground of neither particularly materialistic nor non-materialistic.
According to the article published in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, those partners who were both money lovers appeared to be worse off in marriage stability, satisfaction, and communication skills while those who respected materialism less were more likely to have a stable relation.
“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” said lead author, Jason Carroll. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”
Having more money didn't necessarily make things better. Couples in which both spouses were materialistic tended to be wealthier than couples who didn't place such importance on money, the researchers highlighted.
“How these couples perceive their finances seems to be more important to their marital health than their actual financial situation,” noted Carroll.
“Our study found that materialism was associated with spouses having lower levels of responsiveness and less emotional maturity. Materialism was also linked to less effective communication, higher levels of negative conflict, lower relationship satisfaction, and less marriage stability,” Carroll added.
This may have implications for couples' counseling, the authors noted. “Efforts to develop new interventions aimed directly at addressing the problems associated with materialism in marriage," they wrote, “may be particularly relevant in the current economic context where financial resources may be lower than many couples' expectations.”
