How irritating that smug couples have stumbled on the secret of a perfect relationship

It’s always we, we, we … have you noticed? We all know people who seem to have lost the capacity to talk about themselves as autonomous individuals the moment they couple up. “We’re doing well, thanks”; “We love spaghetti”; “We are thinking about buying an emotional support squirrel.”

Irritatingly, it turns out that these people are not just semantically smug – they’re joyful. A study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside found that “we-talk”, as they term it, is associated with happier and healthier relationships. To quote the undecipherable academese seemingly beloved by social scientists trying to justify the fact they have spent months studying we-ing, they found “meta-analytic evidence that we-talk predicts relationship and personal functioning in romantic couples”. The study also found that hearing your partner use “we” frequently is more strongly linked to happiness than using we-talk yourself.

The long and short of all this meta-analysis is that if you want to make your significant other happy, you should increase your first-person-plural pronoun use. Grammar may not be the answer to all romantic woes, but it can work wonders if you’re in a tense relationship: the researchers found we-talk is a good way to resolve conflicts. Which is common sense, really, because it spreads the blame. The poet William Carlos Williams would probably have had a much better romantic life, for example, if he had just said that “we have eaten the plums that were in the icebox”.

I am sure that, at this point, we are all thinking the same thing. Namely, how much other peer-reviewed relationship advice has been published in scholarly journals? Well, quite a lot as it happens. Let’s romp through the highlights together, shall we?

Perhaps the most important modern love tip is to keep your relationship off social media. Evidence suggests constantly posting updates about how blissfully happy you and bae are is a sign your relationship is falling apart. A 2014 study found that “when people felt more insecure about their partner’s feelings, they tended to make their relationships visible” on Facebook. In an age of oversharing, #Couplegoals is keeping your private life private.

Another top social science tip is to observe the magic ratio and be five times nicer when you argue with your partner. A study from the 1970s found that the ratio between positive and negative interactions during a conflict is a reliable indicator of whether a relationship will last. Happy couples, researchers found, have five or more positive interactions for every one negative interaction. So, next time you get into a tiff with your other half, whip out a notebook and start a tally of your interactions. Did they go, “Uh-huh,” at regular intervals, to suggest they were listening? That’s a positive interaction! Write it down. Soon you will have enough data to provide a statistically sound prediction of whether you will acrimoniously divorce.

Finally, if you really want to fall in love with someone, or rekindle an existing relationship, science recommends you ask your romantic interest if they have a hunch about how they will die. Follow this up by asking about their relationship with their mother. I know that may sound like an unusual route to romance, but there is evidence to back it up. In 1997, a psychologist called Arthur Aron published a paper listing 36 questions that can make you “fall in love with anyone”, including the aforementioned. Two of the participants who took part in his experiment married each other. So there you go. If you want a happy love life, have a hunch about how you will die.