Research Shows Couples Who Write Together, Stay Together

Looks like my husband and I are going to stay married forever and to that, I shout, “Yes!”

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I’ve loved to write for as long as I’ve been able to form letters with a pencil. Little notes to family hidden all over the house (even under china cabinets and not found until a decade later) morphed into writing essays and short stories for school and then I started to keep a journal and write short stories when I needed a way to escape with my thoughts.

Today, I’m a radio personality, but part of my job is to write articles, ten a week, and writing is the highlight of my workday. I never know where my thoughts will take me. Sometimes they’re straight forward and other times I fall into vats of interesting information and that morphs into long pieces on really fascinating subjects.

The reason I mentioned that my husband and I will be together forever is that a study out of Northwestern University found that if married couples each write three short essays during the course of a year, they’re more likely to have a fulfilling and happy marriage.  My husband and I don’t go so far as to write full blows essays to each other, but we do put our feelings to paper, often writing each other long letters, which we keep stored in a shoebox and one day will give to our son.

According to the study, couples should sit down and write for seven minutes every four months and they should write about their marriage, the highs, and the lows. Researchers say doing this will allow the other person to read what their partner is really feeling and it will lead to a boost of all sorts of fun stuff from passion, intimacy, trust, and more.

What’s great is that you don’t have to be newly married to start this “experiment.” Researchers say this writing process is beneficial "whether people were married for one month, 50 years, or anywhere in between."