In further Dispatches from Universities Proving Things You Already Knew, academics in Zurich have shown that couples who do unhealthy things together – smoking, loafing and eating junk food – have higher relationship satisfaction than those who share improving activities, such as going for a run.
If you’re in a relationship as old as or older than the pandemic, you have probably run the gamut of shared activities, from Yoga with Adriene to smoking. Perhaps you think any problems you encountered at the healthy end are specific to your partner, and if you had had a different spouse to go running with, for instance, they might have been a little bit less annoying.
This is wrong, unfortunately. Exercise brings out the worst in people: the self-righteousness, the vanity, the illusion of self-sufficiency, all the qualities that make all of us impossible to live with. I had a fitness column for ages and I wrote once about my anxiety that cardio was making me more rightwing, filling me with Ayn Randian delusions of my own prowess. That was years ago and I still get complaints about it now, from people who can’t even get to the meat of their complaint – that I am stupid – without first describing how disciplined they are in their fitness regimes and how good it makes them look and feel. “QED,” I always reply. “You sound absolutely horrible.” Putting two people in that frame of mind in the same house is like dropping two angry rats into a cage by their tails.
Negative behaviours, meanwhile, unearth softer qualities, the human beneath the carapace – self-effacement and humility, maybe a little light self-parody. Comfort food is a particular win-win pursuit, since you experience the comfort of the food, then a layer of additional comfort that you are as weak as each other. If you have an outlier bad habit – imagine, for instance, that you both vape constantly – you are united in the face of social disapprobation. People call us Attack of the Vapers. “Look at the pair of you, with your dummies,” they say. This is insanely bonding. We’ve almost fused at the roots like two mighty oaks.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
