Generosity: Better than Sex?
The National Marriage Project, a study at the University of Virginia, examined the role of generosity in the marriages of almost 3,000 people. The study found people with the highest scores on the generosity scale were most likely to report feeling “very happy” in their marriages despite the fact that some of them reported being “dissatisfied” on the sexual scale.
This subject is interesting to us because it affirms the suggestions we’ve been giving our patients and captures it all in a neat, all-inclusive term: generosity.
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A lot of marriage problems we see stem from people being impatient with each other. The longer you know someone, the more you come to expect the same behavior and fail to notice different behaviors. For example, if a husband consistently leaves the toilet seat up and then remembers to lower it one day, the wife usually fails to notice the change in behavior. Instead of praising him for remembering, she ignores the good and continues to nag the bad.
In a brilliant column that later became a book entitled, “What Shamu Taught Me about a Happy Marriage,” writer Amy Sutherland points out that noticing positive behavior is the best way to encourage it. It’s what animal trainers do!
According to Sutherland, successful professional animal trainers never punish. Instead, they use an approach called “approximations” in which they reward any small step toward the desired behavior. For example, to teach a baboon to flip, you first reward a small hop, and then reward successively bigger hops. Applying this concept to a husband or wife, if you show appreciation (a smile, a hug, verbal praise) for picking up a single sock and continue to affirm efforts in the same vein, your pile of dirty socks will gradually disappear.
Of course, none of this happens overnight. That’s why patience and generosity play such important roles in the process of maintaining a relationship. You generously spend time to work with your spouse. You insist on being generous with your appreciation. And you stay generous with your attention and observation.
Patience and generosity are very similar concepts and equally important to all relationships. Dr. John Gottman of the University of Washington and founder of the Gottman Institute studies couples in a “love lab” and found that the most accurate predictor of happiness was not the number of fights the couple had but their ability to heal and repair after each fight. This truth applies to all relationships: between spouses, parents and children, and coworkers and friends. Do you often apologize for your mistakes? Are you quick to offer forgiveness when wronged? The generosity you show in your apologies and forgiveness is the key to maintaining a good relationship.
Picture source: Bigstock
No. Negative feedback is sometimes necessary, but it’s best given in a positive light. This is called constructive criticism and should be delivered with the appropriate tone. We get so one-track-minded about correcting our loved ones that we don’t realize how counterproductive nagging can be.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort or money to be generous. You can think of a friend when you see a knick-knack in a store and get it for him. You can be generous with your attention too. You might notice, for example, that your dining buddy really loves mushrooms, so you give her a bag of mushrooms one day, just because.
Don’t be one of those people who need to have things repeated to them 100 times because they’re too busy to pay attention to anything outside of themselves.Take the time to be considerate. It’s the best way to build relationships and connect with the people you care about. Taking time to be helpful helps you as much as it does others. It feels good to be generous.
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