I’ll own my bias before anything else: I exercise alone, and I like it that way. Earbuds in, a podcast running, forty minutes that belong to nobody. So when a headline went around this month saying the habit most likely to strengthen a marriage was sweating next to your spouse, I braced for a guilt trip and went to find the paper.
So the habit in the headline, doing it together, is the one piece of this the data could not separate from doing it alone.
It comes out of Brigham Young University. The BYU news release via ScienceDaily went out under the line “Scientists say this simple habit could strengthen your marriage,” and the study behind it, published in Family Relations by Ashlyn Mildenhall, Matthew Núñez and Jeremy Yorgason, draws on CREATE, a BYU project that has followed newly married couples across the country for more than a decade. This analysis covered 1,693 young married couples, and the ones who worked out together reported better communication, smoother conflict resolution and less marital stress.
About 60 percent of the husbands and wives said they exercised at all, and only about a third exercised with their spouse, according to the BYU news release via ScienceDaily. Mildenhall told BYU that “out of all three outcomes, exercise had the biggest impact on communication.” Impact is a big word for a survey, and I wanted to know how much weight it could carry.
| Measure | Share |
|---|---|
| of husbands and wives said they exercised at all | 60 percent |
Less than the release implies. Everything was collected at once, which is why StudyFinds’ read of the paper notes the study “cannot prove that exercise causes better communication.” The measurement was blunt too: spouses said whether they exercised regularly, listed up to three activities, and said whether each one was done with their spouse, and if either partner said yes to any of them, the couple was coded as exercising together. Intensity, duration and frequency weren’t captured at all.
Then comes the problem the headline skips. Exercising alone was linked to healthier marriages as well, and while shared exercise carried somewhat larger associations, that gap “was not statistically significant for any of the outcomes measured,” per StudyFinds. The release says shared exercise showed stronger links, and the numbers lean that way, but the statistics couldn’t tell the two apart. So the habit in the headline, doing it together, is the one piece of this the data could not separate from doing it alone. Yorgason was more careful than his own press office, conceding that “while the impact is not necessarily large, it is very consistent.”
Wait, though. If a solo run tracks with a better marriage almost as well as a shared one, what’s actually connecting a workout to how a couple argues? My first suspicion is the boring one: the couples who have the time, the energy and the spare evenings to exercise at all are probably the couples with some slack in their lives. Most participants reported moderate to high income and some college education, and having children was tied to poorer communication, worse conflict resolution and more fighting, StudyFinds reports. The BYU release concedes that couples raising kids may have to plan deliberately just to find time for shared activity. A couple without a toddler pulling at both of them has more room to go for a jog and more room to talk things through. The arrow could run from the exercise to the marriage, from the marriage to the exercise, or from a calmer, better-resourced life to both.
The researchers’ own explanation is the part I find most convincing, and it has nothing to do with endorphins pouring in or cortisol settling down. Walking was the most common thing couples did together, and the team argues that shared exercise hands a couple a “natural opportunity to talk, listen and enjoy time together,” shoulder to shoulder, nobody looking at a screen. I’d bet the active ingredient is the uninterrupted conversation and the workout is just a dependable way to buy it. I can’t prove that from this paper either, because once the together-versus-alone gap washes out, the data can’t say whether the talking adds anything beyond the exercise.
Answering it would take what CREATE was built for: following the same couples forward and watching whether the ones who start walking together actually start talking better afterward, or whether the good talkers were the ones lacing up in the first place. A single snapshot can’t do that, however confidently the headline writes around it.
So I’m keeping my solo runs, and nobody needs to sell me a couples’ gym membership. But when my partner wants to come along on the evening walk, the earbuds stay in my pocket, because forty minutes of actual conversation is the one thing in this study I’d bet on.