Abstract
A stable and rewarding love relationship is considered a key ingredient for happiness in Western culture. Building a successful long-term relationship can be viewed as a control engineering problem, where the control variable is the effort to be made to keep the relationship alive and well. We introduce a new mathematical model for the effort control problem of a couple in love who wants to stay together forever. The problem can be naturally formulated as a dynamic game in continuous time with nonlinearities. Adopting a dynamic programming approach, a tractable computational formulation of the problem is proposed together with an accompanying algorithm to find numerical solutions of the couple’s effort problem. The computational analysis of the model is used to explore feeling trajectories, effort control paths, happiness, and stabilization mechanisms for different types of successful couples. In particular, the simulation analysis provides insight into the pattern of change of both marital quality and effort making in intact marriages and how they are affected by certain level of heterogamy in the couple.
Highlights
This article is concerned with the scientific study of long-term dyadic sentimental relationships
There is a strong association between marital quality and overall happiness [5, 6]
The impact of marital quality on overall happiness has increased during the last decades [7], which reveals how important the role of a happy and stable union is nowadays in the quest for happiness
Summary
This article is concerned with the scientific study of long-term dyadic sentimental relationships. This is a theme of paramount importance in the social sciences since marriage is considered a “cultural universal” [1] and the fundamental social institution of most societies in world history [2, 3]. There is a strong association between marital quality and overall happiness [5, 6]. The impact of marital quality on overall happiness has increased during the last decades [7], which reveals how important the role of a happy and stable union is nowadays in the quest for happiness. In the pursuit of happiness, more than 90 percent of American people have married by age 50 [8]
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