Drinking alone is no fun – especially when you’d hoped a drunken heart-to-heart might save a dying relationship. Neither is being the sober chaperone charged with ensuring bae finds his or her way home after a night out.
And now science has confirmed what we knew all along: that couples who drink together have better relationships.
A study by researchers at the University of Michigan found married couples were happier if they either both drank alcohol or if they both abstained, and women were particularly unhappy in their marriages if they were the only drinker.
The research took ten years and involved analysing interviews with a nationally representative sample of more than 2,700 heterosexual US couples over the age of 50. The couples had been married for an average of 33 years and two-thirds were in their first marriage.
“We’re not suggesting that people should drink more or change the way they drink," Dr Kira Birditt of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who studies relationships across adulthood and authored the report, told Reuters Health.
“We’re not sure why this is happening, but it could be that couples that do more leisure time activities together have better marital quality.”
In more than half of the couples studied, both spouses drank. Husbands were more likely to drink than wives, but wives were more dissatisfied when only one of the spouses drank.
Wives reported being more dissatisfied with their marriage when they drank and their husbands didn’t, the study found.
The findings suggest that what's important isn't the amount you drink, but whether you and your partner drink at all, and whether you're compatible in this regard, said Dr Birditt.
Now if this isn't an excuse to crack open a bottle of wine/celebratory class of orange juice (delete as appropriate) with your SO tonight, then we don't know what is. Cheers!