Surly Seniors Become Sad Divorcées
According to a study out this month in Motivation and Emotion but excerpted in the Economist, if you smiled in high school, you'll live happily ever after. If you glowered, you'll glower to the grave.
Matthew Hertenstein and his colleagues at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana asked old boys and girls of the university to answer questions about their current sexual relationships and whether they had ever been divorced. The team then looked up pictures of their volunteers in the university's yearbooks and graded the degree of their smiles. The less a person smiled, it turned out, the more likely he or she was to have been divorced over the course of a lifetime.
Ok so to recap: Smiley kids turn into happy adults and happy adults are more likely to have happy fulfilling marriages. Thanks, science!
What is more interesting, however, is if there is a relationship between senior quotes and marital status. For instance, did that girl quoted "Never did no, never did hide, waiting to see your bright light shine."—R.R., ever get married? (As per Facebook, NO! She did not!) What about the young man whose quote read, "Last night I dreamed I ate a ten pound marshmallow, and I when I woke up my pillow was gone."? That kid, also not married. Now he's the biggest drug dealer in my hometown. But the punk rock kid whose quote was "Mea mihi conscienta plus est quam omnium sermo.", well he joined the Marines and he has a wife and two kids. I think the Kinks wrote a song about that.