Laugh Together To Stay Together

There is evidence that one of the secrets of a long and happy relationship is simply laughing together.

What the research found

One study found shared laughter to be positively associated with overall assessments of relationship quality. Put plainly, couples who laughed together often were the ones more likely to be in strong, positive relationships.

A second study looked at something subtler and found something more surprising. Reminiscing about laughter had a positive influence of its own. When couples recalled the moments they had laughed together, the benefit was greater still.

That is worth pausing on. It suggests the good is not confined to the moment it happens. A shared joke keeps paying out years later, every time one of you brings it up.

The thing not to do

Here the advice turns sharply, and it is the most useful line in the whole piece.

Do not force it. Laughing in your partner’s presence is not the point, and fake chuckling is likely to be actively harmful to a relationship rather than merely useless.

Which makes sense once you see what is being measured. The laughter is not the cause of a good relationship, it is the evidence of one. Manufacture the evidence and you have not changed anything; you have only made the reading unreliable, and the other person can tell.

What to do instead

Work on the conditions rather than the result. Arrange the circumstances where spontaneous, shared laughter becomes more likely, and then leave it alone.

That means time together that is not admin. It means the company of people who make you both laugh. It means the retelling of old stories, which the second study suggests is doing more work than anyone assumed.

Set those up often enough and the laughter arrives by itself, which is the only way it counts.