Winning formula for marriage subtracts the fun

MARRIAGE was once described by Oscar Wilde as the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

The boffins, those esteemed doyens of Oxford in England, have decided they can quite easily ascertain if your marriage will last the course or not.

It’s all about maths, you see. Stick with this — it may not inflame your passion but your marital bliss may depend on it.

Professor James Murray and his team at Oxford University say they have perfected a formula to calculate whether a relationship will make it.

In a study of 700 couples, Prof Murray — a maths expert — predicted the divorce rate to an astonishing 94% accuracy.

The calculation involves a 15-minute conversation between a couple, who are asked to sit opposite each other and talk about a contentious issue such as love, sex or that old bugbear, the in-laws.

The conversation was recorded with positive and negative scores awarded to both the husband and the wife based on their comments.

The partner who showed affection, humour or happiness during the conversation was given the maximum points, with the partner who showed contempt or belligerence getting the minimum points.

The scores of both the husband and the wife were then fed into a mathematical model and plotted on a graph.

The point at which the two lines met showed the marriage’s chance of success or failure.

Simple, unlike marriage.

Prof Murray professed his astonishment at how simple it was to predict the outcome of a marriage.

“I am still absolutely amazed that human emotions can be put into a mathematical model and that a prediction can be made,” he said.

Prof Murray also seemed to take delight in the fact that heated discussions and emotions could be reduced to a graph on a piece of paper.

“What astonished me was that a discussion, sometimes highly charged and emotional, could be so easily and usefully encapsulated.

“If either the husband or the wife is consistently negative, then they are going to get a divorce,” he said.

If all the talk of plotting on graphs and figures sounds terribly boring, that is because it is.

Prof Murray’s study, carried out over 12 years, takes all the fun out of relationships and marriage.

At least a good old-fashioned Irish marriage is often built on rows, disputes, hatred of in-laws. These are the things that make us what we are.

If, like Prof Murray, we could predict whether a relationship would last, there would be no chase, no fun and eventually no romance.

Sure, his results were 94% accurate, but he is a maths expert. He is supposed to get a kick out of graphs and numbers.

Thankfully, the rest of us know that even if 100% of relationships were to fail, the romance is in the not knowing.

And you don’t have to be a professor to figure that much out.