If you thought date nights, mutual trust, and knowing your spouse’s love language was enough to keep your marriage thriving, a new report indicates that you just may be missing a critical element to make your marriage thrive.

“We followed 200 couples married and studied their domestic habits,” lead researcher Sydney Fernbarg explained. “We were actually a bit surprised to discover that the couples who stayed married had just one thing in common: at least one of the partners consistently remembered to flush their poop before getting into the shower.”

The 200 couples studied for this report landed into three distinct groupings: A) only one partner consistently remembered to flush their poop before getting into the shower; B) both partners always remembered to flush their poop and lastly; C) neither partner ever remembered to flush their poop.

According to the report, the most common reactions to the question, “How does it make you feel when you look at your spouse’s shit?” were “nauseated,” “disgusted,” and “I want a divorce.”

Meanwhile, group B couples maintained happy, open communication, flourishing sex lives, and positive feelings about their partner, presumably from never having to have seen their shit in the toilet before getting into the shower.

When individuals from the A and B groups were asked to rate how it felt not to see their partner’s poop in the toilet after they took a shower on a scale from 1-10, most participants wrote in some version of “I don’t know how to answer this question using a 1-10 scale.”

The research group began their next long-term study following 200 couples married in October of 2019, but unfortunately they had to stop it short due to an overwhelming response from the subjects that “Please don’t make me look at the poop again.”