New research shows that couples who travel to work in the same direction, even if not at the same time, are happier than those who don't.
Public transportation won't soon put Match.com out of business, but it has a decent track record, so to speak, when it comes to bringing couples together. Enough couples meet on Philadelphia's transit system for the city's authority to hold an annual contest to determine which one has the cutest story.
In these cases the train or bus simply acts as the venue where the match is made. But if a new psychological study holds true, merely going the same way as another person might be the source of the attraction. (Lenny Kravitz is all like, I could have told you that.)
A group of Chinese researchers propose what they call the "shared-direction effect" in an upcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Couples who commute in the same direction, even if they don't travel on the same train or even leave at the same time, seem to be happier together than those who don't, all other things considered. "That is, mere similarity in the direction of commuting to work increases marital satisfaction," the authors report.
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