You Can Stop Arguing with Your Partner If You Feed Them

A piece in The Times today suggests that, if you're arguing with your partner, you should trying telling them that they're hungry. Whether it works or not—they might still slam a door in your face for not paying the gas bill—is irrelevant; there is a nugget of truth there that can't be ignored.

The scientific experiment cited found that married couples will have more resentment towards one another when their blood sugar is low. If you still had any reservations over whether hanger is a thing, now might be a good time to reconsider.

Scientists experimented on 107 married couples over three weeks, having them test their blood sugar levels every morning and evening. Before going to bed at night, they were told to stick as many (up to 51) pins into a voodoo doll of their partner, recording how many times they cared to drive a fine piece of steel inside them.

"We said the doll represented their spouse and every night before going to bed they should stab them, dependent on how angry they were," said Brad Bushman of Ohio State University.

The average number of pins was, according to the results published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal, only 1.35, but results differed wildly—there were some zeros (aw), but a large number of experimentees drove each and every one of those 51 pins through their partner's tiny, hessian doll heart.

At the end of the three weeks, the couples were given further opportunity to palliate marital resentment when the scientists put them into separate rooms and said they were playing a computer game against one another. When each round of the game was up, whoever "won" was allowed to cause pain for the other by blasting an air horn through their headphones for as long as they wanted.

Of course, they were playing against another computer and only heard the noise at a comfortable volume (it never went louder than a fire alarm), but the results further compounded the argument that we shouldn't enter any arena of potential conflict if we are hungry. Our brains can't handle it. When all the rests were over, scientists compared the blood glucose levels with the number of pins implanted and the volume of noise selected, and, of course, synonmity was found: those with lower blood glucose readings tended to be more aggressive towards their better half. Bushman wasn't surprised.

"Aggression starts when self-control stops," he said. "Self-control is provided by the pre-frontal cortex of the brain — the part in charge of executive function. Even though the brain is two per cent of body weight, it consumes 20 percent of calories. That fuel, glucose, is needed to engage executive functions and regulate emotions." His conclusion, then, is simple: if you need to address something, "don't do it on an empty stomach." So forget sex, romance, spontaneity and kindness; the longevity of your relationship could lie in saving the "we need to talk" line until after you've eaten that bowl of pasta.

The power of love could, really, lie in complex carbohydrates.