For love or money?

If you think looking for that sugar daddy (or momma) is going to buy you love, you may be looking in all the wrong places. According to researchers at Brigham Young University, money doesn’t seem to bring happiness or stability in your married life.

Past research has shown that people who are materialistic are also more anxious, depressed, and insecure than non-materialistic people. What hadn’t been studied was whether relationships are affected by the mismatch in materialism or whether the materialism itself is the cause of unhappiness in relationships.

This study, which was published October 13 in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, looked at how money affects relationships. The researchers reviewed the completed evaluations of 1,734 married couples. 

Each couple answered a series of questions about their marital satisfaction, conflict patterns, marital communication, marriage stability, and other factors. They also rated their agreement with the phrase “Having money and lots of things has never been important to me.”

Though researchers expected to find the most trouble among couples where one was rated materialistic and the other not, they were surprised to find that those who were matched in their degree of materialistic tendencies were the least happy.

They also found that all marriages with at least one materialistic partner were worse off in every area than marriages where neither spouse was materialistic. The researchers suggested this was because the materialistic spouse(s) spend less time nurturing their relationships than they do in pursuing material possessions.

Read about how to nurture your relationship  beyond the material to bankroll a wealth of health benefits for you and your partner.