Express your love: Smilers are less likely to get divorced, and couples who laugh tend to last.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—U.S. Census figures are a depressing indicator that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. But you might be able to avoid that outcome if you look at your fiancé’s or mate’s college yearbook photo, suggests a new study published in the journal Motivation and Emotion. See a big smile and you’re probably safe; a frown, and you and your partner may need to put in extra effort to keep your marriage strong.

THE DETAILS: Researchers at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, analyzed the college yearbook photos of 655 alumni and ranked the smiles in those photographs on a scale of 2 (no smile) to 10 (huge, beaming grin). The participants were also asked a series of questions about relationship status and divorce history. The non-smilers, they found, were more likely to be divorced than the people who smiled the most. To replicate their findings, the researchers performed a second round of smile rankings, this time recruiting 61 adults 55 years or older who were willing to hand over eight photographs from when they were between the ages of 5 and 22. Those adults were also asked about relationship and divorce history, and the researchers reached the same conclusion. The people who smiled the most in their photographs were least likely to be divorced.

WHAT IT MEANS: Although the study didn’t look at whether smiling more now may help you make up for lost time, the study’s author says smiling will certainly improve your social life, if not your marriage. “The [scientific] literature in general would suggest that people who show more positive emotion have larger social networks,” says Matthew Hertenstein, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at DePauw. And don’t worry—his findings don’t doom you to divorce if you weren’t much of a smiler in high school or college. There were exceptions to the “smilers stay married” phenomenon. “We found people who smiled who ended up getting divorced and people who frowned who ended up having long-lasting marriages,” Hertenstein says.

Nevertheless, he notes, people who have a tendency to smile at earlier ages are likely to maintain happiness throughout life and have longer, healthier relationships.

Here are a few ways to improve your overall happiness and your marriage, regardless of what your yearbook picture looks like.

• Find activities that make you happy. And do them, whether singing songs in the car on the way home from work or watching a goofy TV show. Happiness is contagious, studies show, and can rub off on your husband or wife.

• Laugh together. Studies have found that couples who share inside jokes and enjoy doing silly things like karaoke (no matter how bad they may sound) strengthen their relationships.

• Spend time together. It might seem obvious, but numerous surveys have found that married couples tend to let kids and other obligations overrule time spent doing things together. Plan a date night once a week. Even if finances are tough, find a friend willing to watch your kids for free and go to a park or a coffee shop to catch up on non-kid-related conversation.