科研数据能帮助防止离婚吗？

Can Scientific Relationship Advice Save Your Marriage?
科研数据能帮助防止离婚吗？

Samantha Joel’s wedding vows have citations.

萨曼莎·乔尔(Samantha Joel)的结婚誓言是有文献引用的。

A psychology graduate student at the University of Toronto, she developed (along with her now-husband) 10 promises based not on religion or tradition but on scientific research. She’s not alone — another psychology grad student posted her science-based vows at Scientific American in December. And a study examining how factors like wedding size and cost relate to the length of a marriage made a splash in the fall — The Atlantic ran a story on it titled “The Divorce-Proof Marriage.”

乔尔是多伦多大学的心理学研究生(University of Toronto)，她（与现在的丈夫）立下了10条承诺，它们的根据不是宗教或传统，而是科学研究。她不是唯一这么做的人——去年12月，另一个心理学研究生也在《科学美国人》(Scientific American)的博客中贴出了基于科学的誓言。去年秋天，一项研究引起了人们的注意，它探讨的是婚礼规模和支出等因素与婚姻持续时间关系——《大西洋月刊》(The Atlantic)刊登了关于这项研究的文章，名为《防离婚的婚姻》。

Scientifically backed relationship advice seems to be enjoying a wave of popularity, and many say it can be helpful. But can data really prevent divorce? And do we necessarily want it to?

这种有科学支持的情感建议，目前似乎很有人气，而且很多人都说它们可能会很有用。但数据真的能防止离婚吗？而且我们真的希望事情能这样吗？

“I really believe that research can inform our personal decisions better than anecdotes, better than advice from individuals, better than intuition,” said Ms. Joel. “I believe in a data-driven approach to everything, including relationships — and in fact particularly relationships, since that’s what I study.”

“我真的相信，与个别案例、别人提供的建议，以及直觉相比，研究可以帮助我们做出更好的个人决定，”乔尔说。“我相信，数据驱动的方法可以应用于一切事情，包括情感问题——尤其是情感问题，因为这是我的研究方向。”

The scientific method is “the best way to answer questions,” she added. “We accept this in pretty much every domain of life — with relationships, I think, though, people get a little bit anxious that love is being reduced.” But “if you want real answers that are actually helpful, you need to get specific and you need to get objective.”

科学方法是“回答问题的最佳途径，”她说。“在生活中的几乎每一个领域，我们都接受科学方法——但是，在情感关系上，我认为，人们有一点担忧，感觉好像爱情会被打了折扣似的。”但是，“如果你想听到真正有帮助的答案，你就需要做到具体而客观。”

Her 10 promises — which she and her husband read aloud at their wedding — include a pledge “to support and protect your freedom; because although our lives are intertwined, your choices are still yours alone.” This one is based on research showing that a lack of autonomy in relationships can make people less happy. She and her husband also promised each other to “show you, every day, that I know exactly how lucky I am to have you in my life,” inspired by a study showing that people who feel more appreciated by their partners are more appreciative in return, and that they are less likely to break up.

她和丈夫在婚礼上大声朗读了那10条承诺，其中包括：“支持和保护你的自由，因为虽然我们的生活息息相关，你的选择仍然取决于你。”这条承诺背后的研究显示，在人际关系中缺乏自主权让人感到不快乐。她和丈夫还互相承诺“每一天都向你展示，我清楚地知道，有你在我的生命中，我是多么幸运”，启发这条承诺的研究显示，感觉从伴侣那里获得更多的人，往往对伴侣更加赞赏，两人分手的可能性也更小。

“Expressing appreciation to your partner, noticing the things you love about them and telling them that you love those things about them,” said Ms. Joel, “just has wondrous effects. They feel appreciated, and then in turn they feel better, and just expressing the gratitude makes you feel better, and then they want to reciprocate the gratitude, so then they appreciate you more which makes you feel better.”

“向你的伴侣表达赞赏，注意到你喜欢他们的那些方面，并告诉他们，你爱他们的这些方面，就会产生奇妙的效果。”乔尔说，“他们感觉自己受到赞赏，这让他们感觉更好，而仅仅是表达赞赏，也会让你感觉更好，然后他们想要回报这种赞赏，于是他们对你表示赞赏，这又让你感觉更好。”

The 10 promises are now posted on the couple’s fridge, and Ms. Joel says they’ve proved helpful. “I think my exposure to relationship research has really helped my relationships — my romantic relationship and my other close relationships, too.”

这10条承诺现在张贴在这对夫妻的冰箱上，乔尔说，事实已经证明，它们很有帮助。“我觉得，以我对情感关系研究的了解，确实对我自己的关系起到了帮助，不仅是我的浪漫关系，也包括其他亲密关系。”

Katherine Hertlein, a professor of marriage and family therapy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, also thinks understanding research about relationships can be useful for couples. They might benefit, for instance, from knowing about work suggesting that “a certain level of egalitarianism” in relationships seems to be healthy. Also potentially useful: Research on how people’s conception of an ideal relationship affects their real lives. If you “don’t experience your relationship as living up to that ideal,” she said, “you’re not going to be as successful. So couples who have a minimized ideal-real gap are the ones who tend to do better.”

凯瑟琳·哈特林(Katherine Hertlein)是拉斯维加斯的内华达大学(University of Nevada)婚姻和家庭治疗教授，她也认为，理解情感关系研究的成果，可能对两人关系很有裨益。比如，有研究表明，在关系中“一定程度的平等主义”似乎是健康的，了解这样的研究就可能会令关系受益。还有一个研究表明，人们对理想关系的定义，会对他们的现实生活产生影响。如果“你觉得自己的关系没有达到理想标准，”她说，“你就不会感到很美满。所以，如果现实和自己的理想标准之间差距非常小，两人关系通常会更好。”

Less applicable, she argued, is data on factors like the size of the wedding. “I really believe some of those variables are context-driven,” she said. If small weddings are correlated with shorter marriages, other factors may be at play. Maybe some couples invite fewer guests because their family members don’t get along, and “when couples have problems with their family of origin, those are couples who actually are going to be less likely to be successful.” So if you’re counting wedding guests, it’s “the reason for the size that actually becomes more important.”

但她说，关于婚礼规模等因素的数据就不太适用了，“我确实认为，其中的一些变量和具体情况有关。”如果婚礼规模小和婚姻持续时间短之间存在相关关系，可能是其他因素在其作用。有些夫妇邀请的客人少，可能是因为他们与家人本来关系不佳，而“当他们和自己的原家庭存在矛盾时，这些夫妻之间的关系也不太可能美满。”因此，如果你在计算参加婚礼的宾客人数，你要明白，“更重要的其实是影响宾客数量的原因”。

Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo M. Mialon, the authors of the wedding study, also said in an email that their results may not reveal anything about the causes of divorce: “While we find that weddings expenses are inversely correlated with marriage duration, this does not necessarily imply that spending more on a wedding will cause a marriage to be less likely to last. Perhaps those couples who tend to have more expensive weddings are simply those couples that tend not to be the best match for each other to begin with.”

安德鲁·弗朗西斯-谭(Andrew Francis-Tan)和雨果·M·米亚伦(Hugo M. Mialon)是这项婚礼研究报告的作者，他们也在一封电邮中表示，该研究的结果可能不会揭示离婚的原因：“虽然我们发现，婚礼的费用与婚姻持续的时间呈负相关关系，但这并不一定意味着婚礼花费较多，就会导致婚姻较早结束。也许那些倾向于办铺张婚礼的夫妻，往往本来就不是天作之合。”

Their findings show that expensive weddings don’t mean longer-lasting marriages, but they don’t show that cheap ones will protect you from divorce. “If we were to give broad advice on the basis of our study,” they said, “the advice would simply be: Ignore pressure from wedding industry advertising and do what you think will maximize your joint long-term happiness.”

他们的研究结果显示，铺张的婚礼并不意味着更持久的婚姻，但并未显示低成本婚礼有助于防止离婚。“如果要让我们以这项研究为基础，提供笼统性的建议，”他们说，“这个建议无非就是：无视婚庆业广告带来的压力，你认为怎样可以最大限度地提高婚姻的长期幸福度，就怎样做。”

Amie Gordon, one of the authors of the study on appreciation cited in Ms. Joel’s vows, cautions that relationship researchers often start by “looking at what happens naturally in a relationship” — what couples are already doing, and how that affects their bond. If couples who show gratitude to each other have healthier relationships, that doesn’t necessarily mean ungrateful partners who start behaving more gratefully will necessarily see their relationships improve. “If couples try to inject gratitude, or any other positive behavior, in their lives in a way that is not authentic, it’s possible it could backfire,” she explained in an email. “So when considering whether to apply research to one’s own life, people need to know whether the researchers simply measured what was already naturally occurring, or if they asked people to do something different.”

乔尔誓言中关于赞赏的部分也来自一项研究，艾米·戈登(Amie Gordon)是该研究的作者之一，她警告说，情感关系研究者的出发点往往是“关系中自然而然地会发生什么”——两人已经在怎么做了，这如何影响他们的关系。如果互相表达赞赏的伴侣之间存在更加健康的关系，这并不一定意味着，不这么做的伴侣在开始这么做之后，关系就会有所改善。“如果两人试图把赞赏或其他任何积极的行为，强行注入到二人世界中，效果有可能会适得其反，”她在一封电邮中解释。“所以，在考虑是否把研究结果应用到自己的生活中时，人们需要知道，研究者是否只衡量了那些自然发生的事情，还是让伴侣尝试一些不一样的事情。”

Research on happiness, she added, “shows that different happiness interventions (gratitude, optimism, etc.) work well for different types of people. I think it’s probably similar for relationships — people have to do what feels right to them, so I’d suggest they try out research that resonates with them.”

她说，关于幸福的研究显示，“不同的幸福干预方法（感恩、保持乐观等）对于不同类型的人效果都很好。我想，这对于关系也是一样——人们只有做那些自己感觉对劲的事情才有效果，所以我建议他们尝试尝试那些能引起他们共鸣的研究。”

And Vicki Larson, co-author of the book “The New ‘I Do’: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels,” has pushed back against the idea that its possible to protect oneself from divorce. In an essay for Divorce360, she writes, “you can’t affair- or divorce-proof a marriage because you can’t control another person’s behavior, you can only control your own.” And, she said in an interview, “even if you fight well, even if you’re having sex, even if you’re doing all the things in a marriage” that therapists would recommend, “you can’t control what your spouse is doing.”

维奇·拉尔森(Vicki Larson)是《“我愿意”新解：为怀疑者、现实主义者和反叛者重塑婚姻》(The New‘I Do’: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels)的合著者，她反驳了“防离婚”的想法。在为Divorce360撰写的一篇文章中，她表示，“你不能防止出轨和离婚，因为你无法控制他人的行为，只能控制自己。”她还在一次采访中说，“即使你很努力，即使你和伴侣有性生活，即使你在婚姻中做了治疗师建议的所有正确事情，你还是无法控制伴侣做什么。”

“All you can do is just really be the best person you can,” she said, “and then hope that you married the right person.”

“你能做的，无非是成为最好的自己，”她说，“然后希望自己是和合适的人结了婚。”

And, she said, you might not even want to “divorce-proof” your marriage. “Sometimes divorce is the healthier thing to do,” she said. “Our only marker right now of a successful marriage is longevity,” she added. But other markers are possible — a couple could consider their marriage successful if it allowed them to raise children together, for instance. “It really is up to a couple to decide what it is that they want to accomplish in the marriage.”

而且，她说，你可能甚至不想让你的婚姻可以“防离婚”。“有时候离婚是件健康的事情，”她说。“我们现在衡量婚姻美满的唯一标志是存续时间，”她说。但可能存在其他标志，比如一对夫妇可以觉得，如果这段婚姻能让他们一同抚养孩子，那么它就很美满。“一对夫妇想要在婚姻中获得什么，这真的是由他们自己来决定的。”

“You have to ask yourself, ‘Well, why do I want to get married? What do I want?’” Answering those questions, she said, will help you “find a better partner, someone with the same goals” and make it “more likely that you will have a successful marriage by the way you define it.”

“你必须问问自己，‘为什么我想结婚？我想从中获得什么？’”她说，回答这些问题有助于你“找一个更好的、与你志同道合的伴侣，”并且“让你更容易享有你所定义的美满婚姻。”