Imagine you’ve finally found the ideal partner, your perfect match. They’re nice, helpful, loving and your friends and family adore them. They’re financially stable, reliable, and look amazing.
However, if you make an innocent joke about them they get immensely pissed off. They feel super offended and make you tell them you regret what you’ve done.
I was through that once. I had a relationship with a person who would feel hurt even by the politest joke at their expense. Eventually, we broke up and I blamed me for the end of our relationship. After all, no-one likes being made fun of.
However, it turns out that I wasn’t the only one to blame. In fact, thin-skinned people (or more specifically the ones that are too thin-skinned) are not able to be really happy especially when it comes to love. Good sense of humor is one of the key elements of happiness so the individuals who lack it tend to have much more difficult personalities and therefore feel happy and satisfied much less often.
Science also confirms that.
Research shows that couples with the most stable and long-lasting relationships are those who can joke with one another in a polite and loving way of course.
The researcher Jeffrey Hall of the University of Kansas carried out 39 studies. They included 15,000 participants and were conducted during a period of 30 years.
He examined which factors make a relationship strong and which can fail it. Surprisingly, the results of his study that had been conducted for over 3 decades revealed that the sense of humor of a couple’s members is essential for the longevity of their relationship.
But that discovery doesn’t refer to just having any sense of humor in general. Halls’ research pointed out that the specific ability of the partners to laugh at the same things is the key to the success of their relationship.
“People say they want a sense of humor in a mate, but that’s a broad concept. That people think you are funny or you can make a joke out of anything is not strongly related to relationship satisfaction. What is strongly related to relationship satisfaction is the humor that couples create together,” Hall explained to Distractify.
It turns out that creating unique jokes with your significant other reinforces your relationship and also helps to get to know each other better and to feel more comfortable in each other’s company.
Further, Hall states that:
“Say you and your partner share a quirky sense of humor, but romantic comedies or sitcoms do nothing for either of you… It’s not that any style or a sense of humor is any better or worse. What matters is that you both see quirky humor as hysterical. If you share a sense of what’s funny, it affirms you and affirms your relationship through laughter.”
He even mentioned in another article that people who feel free to politely joke at their significant other’s expense are more confident and happier about their relationship with the other person.
“Playfulness between romantic partners is a crucial component in bonding and establishing relational security. Particularly shared laughter is an important indicator of romantic attraction between potential mates,” Hall adds.
An apt example of this theory are some very successful famous couples who would roast each other regularly. And feel happy about it. Look at Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively for instance. Her Happy Birthday message for him consisted of a photo of the “other” Hollywood Ryan, Mr. Gosling.
This happened after Ryan had published a Happy Birthday post to his wife with a photo of himself only, cropping her out of it. Another time Blake announced she had made a “mistake” marrying Ryan instead of his hotter brother, Gordon.
Below you can read how Ryan responded to the people spreading rumors that he and Blake weren’t spending enough time with each other.
So if you find a person who laughs at the same things as you and you can create funny jokes together, you are lucky and you shouldn’t let them go.
“Having an aggressive sense of humor is a bad sign for the relationship in general, but it is worse if the style of humor is used in the relationship. If you think your partner tells mean-spirited jokes, then it’s likely you’ve seen that firsthand in your relationship,” concluded Hall.