This One Question Can Predict A Happy Relationship, According to Data Science

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Before we start a relationship, we always want to know: Will this work out?

This is equally true with business and romance. After all, who wants to waste their time with something doomed to fail?

And so, we try to filter. If we’re evaluating a potential romantic partner, for example, we start to ask a lot of questions about them. Do they have the same sense of humor as us? The same politics? The same sensibilities?

Data scientist Samantha Joel wondered if any of those questions matter. Is it actually possible to predict who you’ll be happy with? So she dove into the data, and found that there is only one question — only ONE! — that meaningfully predicts successful relationships.

It also happens to predict successful work relationships too.

Want to know what it is? Read on.

What we’re looking for

We think we know what we want in a partner.

Research confirms this: It is relatively easy to predict how people will swipe on apps — because we know, for example, that people swipe vigorously on tall men, rich people, people of desired races (though folks rarely admit that), and people who are similar to us, even in meaningless ways. For example, your likelihood of matching increases by 11.3% when a person shares your initials.

But can those traits really predict relationship success? Samantha Joel looked at data for almost 12,000 couples, to examine how happy people felt in their relationships. (Her work was written about in the book Don’t Trust Your Gut, which I found excerpted in Wired.) This included data on all sorts of traits — demographics, physical appearance, sexual preferences, interests, health, values, and more.

She applied machine learning to all that data to see if any of the traits could predict happiness. In other words, it was like asking: If you’re compatible in this way, are you going to be happy?

The answer was pretty much always no.

Although we know what people look for in romantic partners, we see no patterns in what actually leads to successful relationships. Wealth didn’t matter. Shared traits didn’t matter. No particular data point could predict whether or not a relationship would work…

Except one. Only one.

Here it is: If a person was happy with their life before the relationship, they were four times more likely to have a happy relationship.

In other words, if you were to ask one important question at the beginning of a relationship, that question is not, “What are you looking for?”

That question is, “Are you satisfied with your life right now?”

Put happiness first

This same principle is true in other parts of our lives, too. We think attaining something will make us happy, but the key to happiness in our pursuits is actually just being happy with yourself in the first place.

Take success, for example. Surely if we land a big job or win an award or recognition, our happiness will skyrocket, right? Wrong. This review of 225 studies in Psychological Bulletin finds that success does not predict happiness. Instead, the opposite is true: Happiness results in more success.

That’s because when people are happy, they seek out opportunities to reinforce their happiness — and reinforcing your happiness feels like success.

This study of soldiers in Journal of Happiness Studies finds something similar. It looked at members of the US Army, and found that happier soldiers make for better soldiers. In fact, the happiest soldiers were four times more likely than their least-happy colleagues to receive awards for heroism, performance, and service. And that was true across demographics and education levels.

Obviously, happiness is not something you can conjure from nothing. If you are struggling right now, I cannot simply convince you to be happy. But I can at least tell you that outside forces will not create that happiness by themselves.

When we try to predict the future, and to determine if something is worth our time, we now know where to look. It is not at solely at others. It is also at ourselves.

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Cover credit: Getty Images / Newton Daly