What Would You Give Up To Save Your Marriage?

We clearly love our toys. It might be our new iPhone 4S or the Mercedes S-Class. In marriage, the more toys we love, the more difficulty we have.

A new study by scholars at Brigham Young University looked at more than 1,700 married couples across the U.S. to determine how their attitudes toward money affected their marriages.

Each couple completed a questionnaire which evaluated their relationship and asked, among other things, how much they value “having money and lots of things.” The study, which was just published in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, found that couples who say money is not important to them score about 10 percent to 15 percent better on measures of relationship quality, such as marriage stability, than those couples where both or one spouse are materialistic.

In a somewhat surprising twist, the researchers found that those couples in which both partners said they valued lots of money—about 20 percent of the couples in the study—fared worse than those couples who were mismatched and just had one materialist in the marriage.

“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” said Jason Carroll, a BYU professor of family life and lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”

So I ask you, if you had to give up one of your toys if it meant saving your marriage, what would it be?