Oct 15, 2010 07:50 GMT  ·  By
People in long-term relationships are more ignorant of their partners' preferences, and this is apparently a good thing
   People in long-term relationships are more ignorant of their partners' preferences, and this is apparently a good thing

A team of psychologists from the University of Basel propose that an increased level of ignorance about their partner's preferences is what allows many to go through long-term relationships.

Love and compromise have their say in this as well, but being able to ignore a large amount of information about their better half is apparently what makes so many marriages work in the long run.

In the new study, experts demonstrated that people who lived happily together some 40 years after marriage tended to know a lot less about what their partner liked.

This held true for food preferences, movie choices, or home interior design, the two psychologists say. The work was led by UB experts Benjamin Scheibehenne and Jutta Mata.

It was additionally demonstrated that people who have only been in relationships for one or two years tend to know a lot more about these things.

The new research was conducted on 38 young couples aged 19 to 32, and on 20 older couples aged 62 to 78, by the UB team and Indiana University in Bloomington psychologist Peter Todd.

Experts at the two universities believe that, though this pattern may appear counterintuitive, it may actually have solid foundations, Wired reports.

“That wasn’t what we expected to find, but this evidence lends support to a hypothesis that accuracy in predicting each other’s preferences decreases over the course of a relationship despite greater time and opportunity to learn about each other’s likes and dislikes,” Todd said.

He made the statement while making a visit at the University of Basel, on October 13. He revealed that the largest gap in knowledge came when food was brought up.

Details of the new investigation have been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the esteemed Journal of Consumer Psychology.

One of the main reasons why these discrepancies occur, experts believe, is because people in such long-lasting relationships simply assume that there is little they can learn about each other.

This idea seems to be supported by another conclusion in the study, which showed that seniors were a lot more likely than their younger peers to express confidence about knowing their partner's preferences.

An interesting aspect was that, even though the discrepancies existed in older couples, it was seniors that reported more satisfaction with their relationships that people in the younger couples.