Everyone is familiar with the cliche married couple that has a henpecked husband who never dares to contradict his wife. But according to one experiment, this could prove to be disastrous to your relationship in real life.

The study was set up to examine the old marriage advice about whether it’s more important to be happy or to be right. The husband who had to agree with everything his wife said, while the wife was not informed of the purpose of the study and just asked to record her quality of life.

In the end, the experiment only lasted for 12 days because it was proving so harmful to the husband's mental health.
Things went rapidly downhill for the couple. The man’s quality-of-life scores fell, from 7 to 3, over the course of the experiment. The wife’s scores rose modestly, from 8 to 8.5, before she became hostile to the idea of recording the scores. Rather than causing harmony, the husband’s agreeableness led to the wife becoming increasingly critical of what he did and said (in the husband’s opinion). After 12 days he broke down, made his wife a cup of tea (New Zealand is, after all, a Commonwealth country), and explained the experiment. At this point the Data Safety Monitoring Committee, as the researchers called it, stopped the study because of “severe adverse outcomes.”
The researchers noted that this was further proof that if given too much power, humans tend to “assume the alpha position and, as with chimpanzees, they become very aggressive and dangerous.”

However, the fact that the experiment was conducted on just one couple who probably had other underlying issues beforehand could probably have an influence on the result as well. So at the end of the day, it probably pays to fight fair instead of always insisting on having your way all the time.

[TIME]