'Marriage works' according to Andy Murray, but is love a performance-enhancing drug for others?
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Version 0 of 1. Commitmentphobes will be reeling, single people will be seething and Iain Duncan Smith will be planning to put it on a poster, next to a picture of a sad-faced single mother. But mainly, Andy Murray’s words “marriage works!”, which he scribbled on a TV camera after winning his second clay court title, were quite sweet. The player credits his wedding last month to Kim Sears, his longterm girlfriend, for his unbeaten form. “I’ve always said if the personal stuff is happy and under control that helps your performance on the court,” said Murray after the win. It sounds obvious enough, but one study, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology in 2007, appeared to confirm that getting married actually produced the opposite effect. “We found that there was a drop in performance among male tennis players in the year after they got married compared with the year before,” says Daniel Farrelly, an evolutionary psychologist. “Testosterone is an important hormone for encouraging competition with other males, but because it’s quite a nasty hormone to have – it makes you do strange things and is not very good for your immune system – it’s better not to have it when you don’t need it, so there is a finding that there’s a drop [in testosterone] after marriage.” He would expect to see the same for men in other sports, and, to a certain extent, for female athletes. “We’d predict the same things because testosterone causes motivation to compete in women as well, although the effect would be smaller.” Should sportspeople not get married then? “That would be my suggestion,” he says, “though since we published this paper, there have been really good examples of married tennis players who have done really well – Roger Federer is particularly annoying.” In 2009, a month after his marriage, Federer won the French Open for the first time and that same year surpassed Pete Sampras’s grand-slam record. It isn’t just tennis – other examples contradict Farrelly’s findings. For instance, Mo Farah’s winning form appeared to speed up after his marriage in 2010; a month after his wedding, he won the London 10,000, and, three months later, he took gold in the 10,000 metres at the European Athletics Championships. Sports psychologist and former English cricketer Jeremy Snape, who runs the training company Sporting Edge, says marriage can be extremely positive for an elite athlete. “Every champion needs the emotional stability that comes from a strong support network. Contrary to the idea that players lose their edge, marriage and parenthood often provide the relaxed focus needed for success.” One of the traps, he says, “for performers in any walk of life is that they mistake their identity for what they do as a job”. When things don’t go well on the pitch or track, it can be much more painful than for someone who has a better life balance. Whether Murray is still in a honeymoon period remains to be seen, but Farrelly is relatively confident he may escape any negative effect. That is more likely, he thinks, to happen to more emotional players. “Murray used to be quite an aggressive, emotional player, but in the past few years, he is more calm and measured. Getting married now probably wouldn’t have as much of an effect on his performance as it would before.” A good reason to have put it off for nine years then. |