Want to know what helps make a marriage happy and successful? According to the University of Virginia, the spirit of generosity makes a marriage strong.

The Marriage Project, which is an ongoing study dedicated to researching the internal truths of American marriages, just released a new study on marital generosity, which sought to determine whether or not acts of generosity benefited marriages or not. Both men and women who scored as “very generous” on the study’s scale were happier in their marriages than their less generous counterparts. 

The researchers specified a ratio of 5 to 1 of generous versus negative actions needed to maintain a strong relationship. The acts of generosity can be as simple as making someone coffee or expressing affection to the other person. 

To see how your relationship can be scored on the generosity scale, you can take a quiz HERE on the New York Times blog page. The questions in the quiz ask how often you do certain things for your spouse and how frequently you express your admiration for your partner to how often you tell your partner you are sorry for your actions. 

Not everyone who participated in the study was happy with their marriages; there were some individuals in the study who reported that they felt as if they crossed the line from generosity and into too much self-sacrifice. The results of the Marriage Project's research results regarding the participants’ perception of self-sacrifice varied according to gender; men willing to sacrifice more in their relationships were happier about their sacrifices than the women who sacrificed more in their relationships.

The findings of the Marriage Project study on generosity within a marriage are not altogether that surprising. Little acts of kindness can go a long way to making a spouse feel loved, appreciated, and respected. On the hand, a marriage without any generosity can crumble very easily when times get hard within a marriage. 

There is also a long history of women being burdened with too much of a hard balance between work, childcare, and household responsibilities that could account for their lack of marital satisfaction when they believe they are sacrificing too much. Men, on the other hand, might relish the satisfaction of going the extra mile for their wife.