London - Couples are happier and marriages last longer when men pull their weight with housework and childcare, new research reveals.
A survey of 160 heterosexual couples aged between 25 and 30 revealed that the more men were involved, the better the relationship was for both partners.
All couples asked had been married for an average of five years and had at least one child aged five or under.
Around 40 percent of the women also had full-time or part-time jobs.
The study monitored how the parents divided household responsibilities and how those chores affected the husbands’ and wives’ relationships.
Adam Galovan, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri who carried out the study, said sharing responsibilities didn’t necessarily mean couples divided chores equally.
“Sharing can mean something different to every couple,” he said.
“It could be taking turns changing nappies, or one parent watching the children while the other prepares dinner.
“Doing things together and having mutual, agreed-upon divisions of labour benefited both spouses.
“The more wives perceived that husbands were engaged in routine family work tasks, the better the relationships were for both partners.
“Wives in our study viewed father involvement and participation in household chores as related.
“Doing household chores and being engaged with the children seem to be important ways for husbands to connect with their wives, and that connection is related to better couple relationships.”
The bonds between fathers and their children also contributed to couples’ marital satisfaction, Galovan said.
He added: “When wives felt their husbands were close to their children, both spouses reported better marriages.
“The father-child bond was particularly important for wives.”
Galovan said couples should realise that making the transition to parenthood required an adjustment period, and it was normal for husbands and wives to feel stressed.
To counteract the stress, he recommended parents make each other a priority.
This meant doing things like having date nights without the children.
He said: “Find ways to connect throughout the day, even if it’s just doing dishes together or watching a movie.
“These simple connections in daily life seem to enhance couples’ marital satisfaction and improve the quality of their relationships.”
The study was published in the Journal of Family Issues.
But helping your partner when you’re in a bad mood makes your mood worse
Making small sacrifices for your partner when you don’t feel like it could be damaging your relationship, according to University of Arizona social scientists.
Men and women offering to take on a chore normally done by the other may make them seem like the perfect partner. Yet when these sacrifices are done by a partner who is feeling stressed, it can make the stress worse, the study found.
Research scientist Casey Totenhagen and her team carried out daily surveys among 154 married and unmarried couples.
The length of relationship ranged from from six months to 44 years.
The couples recorded all their activities, from time spent with friends to childcare and chores.
They were then asked to record which activities they considered “sacrifices”.
Sacrifices included those they had done that were usually done by their partner.
Alongside this, everyone filled in details of how well their day had been, the hassles they had experienced and how it had affected their mood.
A section was reserved for them to rank their feelings towards their partners on a daily basis, including how close, committed and satisfied they felt about the relationship.
The kind of sacrifices made were small and not significant in terms of how they could change a relationship but generally carried out to show “niceness”, said the researchers.
Doing such good deeds while in a good mood made the person doing it feel more committed to the relationship.
However, it appeared to have little effect on the other partner, who felt no different about the relationship after the nice act than they did before.
This may be because they were unaware that their partner was making a “sacrifice” simply by taking the washing off the line or emptying the dishwasher, for instance.
Alternatively, if the person making the “sacrifice” felt stressed when they took on the extra task, they felt no better about the relationship afterwards.
Totenhagen said: “On days when people were really stressed, those sacrifices weren’t really beneficial any more, because it was just one more thing on the plate at that point.
“If you’ve already had a really stressful day, and then you come home and you’re sacrificing for your partner, it’s just one more thing.”
But the answer may be quite simple, particularly for relationships where both partners work hard and suffer stress. Do more together.
She said: “If I have a terrible day at work, I’m going to come home feeling grumpy, and probably my quality of interaction with my partner won’t be as great.
“And if my partner has a stressful day, they’re probably coming home feeling grumpy and they won’t have the energy to have positive interactions, so I still suffer from my partner’s stressful day.
“It’s really important that couples work on coping with those daily stresses as they occur, before they have a chance to build up.”
They may appear to be small things but it was small things that could make “good relationships good, and bad relationships bad”, said Totenhagen. - Daily Mail