STUDY: Be As Drunk Or As Sober As Your Spouse, And You’re Good to Go
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The University of Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions says that if you don’t drink on the same level as your partner, don’t be surprised if you come up against some marital discord.
And by “on the same level” we don’t necessarily mean, like, a spousal shot-for-shot guzzling contest. It’s more about your drinking habits:
“Our results indicate that it is the difference between the couple’s drinking habits, rather than the drinking itself, that leads to marital dissatisfaction, separation and divorce,” lead study author and research center director Kenneth Leonard, PhD, said in a statement.
And what’s interesting—and also maybe good?—is that it doesn’t seem to matter if you’re both drunk as sailors all the time or the strictest teetotallers around; what matters is that the two of you are just about on the same page, whatever that pages is, when it comes to drinking. The study followed 634 couples for the first nine years of their marriage and found that with couples who both drank heavily or hardly at all, the divorce rate was around 30 percent. But when one drank heavily and the other hardly at all, it was around 50 percent.
Sooo … cheers?
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