How To Tell That Couples Belong Together

It’s very likely that you did pick up disturbing messages between these ill-suited couples. There is no doubt that people can send all sorts of emotional messages through body movement and tone of voice. A study was done by two psychologists, Drs. Ernst G. Beier and Daniel P. Sternberg, to look at just how much body language newlyweds use to communicate with each other.

Using fifty couples, the doctors gave each a psychological interview to find out how much conflict there was in the marriage. At the same time, hidden cameras recorded the couples’ body language toward each other.

Once the researchers found out which couples were having trouble and which had relatively peaceful marriages, they showed the videotapes of the interviews to experts in nonverbal communication and asked them to rate each couple on body language interaction.

Specifically, the experts looked for the presence or absence of eye contact, laughter, talking, touching, and the way the couples held their bodies, if their legs and arms were closed or open, if they leaned toward or away from each other.
The conclusion the researchers drew after matching the experts’ reports with their own psychological interviews was that body language expressed a person’s feelings very accurately. The “happy” couples would sit closer together, Dr. Beier said, “look more frequently into each other’s eyes and touch each other more often than they touched themselves.”

According to Dr. Beier, the couples experiencing the most conflict crossed their arms and legs, avoided eye contact with each other, and touched themselves more than they touched their partners. Obviously, in your church group, you received and interpreted all these signals correctly and were able to spot the couples with trouble in their future.

In following up his couples years later, Dr. Beier reported some interesting discoveries. If the wife in a marriage is dissatisfied, the couple is far more unhappy than they are if the husband is dissatisfied. As a rule, husbands had the same number of complaints as time went on. Not so the wives. They complained more and more as the marriage developed. He concluded that women expect a great deal out of a marriage—but don’t get much. Men expect little in the first place, and they aren’t disappointed when they don’t get more!