Surely sampling bias would be really hard to remove from this.

How did they control for couples that remove themselves from the sample set because they broke up due to bickering (or a correlation with bickering)?

>How did they control for couples that remove themselves from the sample set because they broke up due to bickering

Do they need to? Those are not couples anymore.

Besides, isn't it easy to track couples for several years, and see which humor each other, which bicker, and which break?

I don't know about you, but if I was with my partner " in a laboratory setting " I would certainly be on my best behavior.

Seriously, this is literally survivorship bias!

Only if non-survivors (broken up relationships) matter.

If the idea is "what happens while still in the context of a couple" then it doesn't. In fact that's already implicit in that the couple must "age".

That’s a good point. They did stay away from “the key to happy marriages is more humor” trope, so it really is just observational.

In effect, that couple stopped aging because that couple ceased to be.

I wonder how much of this is related to where these couples are in life, financially, career-wise, etc

I have a feeling, based on absolutely nothing, that it isn't until later in life that we realize that this is it. As in, you can basically consider what you are doing now to be your life. There really isn't some big shift ahead where finally, all of a sudden you manage to bicker your spouse into who you wish they were. It's just... this.

Life is sort of a joke, but it takes a bloody long time to get.

Life is really a sort of a joke. But it's one thing to know something and quite a different thing to admit and accept it.

As I grow older, I still try to resist those thoughts - I still like to think that there is that big shift ahead, that something life-changing will happen. That this is not all there is.

And I rationalize this to myself by saying - "otherwise what would be the point?"

Anyway, thank you for putting it the way you did. It was another bump for me to accept the inevitable.

Maybe, the big shift would happen once I've accepted! And then it wouldn't matter!

Edit: Yes, I haven't got the joke yet!

Can't help but wonder how much of the replication crisis is prematurely elevating an interesting observation to Law.

I wish it would hurry up, I don't have too much longer left before death is going to do the replacing.