In an age of discord, small words might make a marriage work

The language of marital discord, as a wise sage observed (or perhaps didn’t), has a complex grammar. One isn’t talking about the old stuff; the two-different-beings-coming-together with attendant niggles that might or might not have to do with squeezing the toothpaste at the wrong point or the proverbial toilet-seat-up-or-down dispute. Or even mixed marriages, where, say, in India, a couple may find both terms of endearment as those of disagreement being expressed best in respective, and possibly unintelligible, tongues.

That, as any reader will aver, might cause a problem or two. But now we seem to have another of those awesomely important pieces of research that pins all this down even further to personal pronouns and articles. That’s right. A Texas Tech University researcher, using speed-dates analysis, found people with a common fondness for the appropriate functional words have a better chance of staying together longer.

Which, in English conversation, means one should not say “apple a day”, rather, “an apple a day”, or not “open jam bottle” but “open the jam bottle”. Not “I was saying…” in an argument but “and I was saying…” — thereby giving the other party the chance to suspect that you had, in fact, been listening to whatever was being said by him or her. Little things, friends, they make the difference.