Another Valentine's Day, another study hating on gaming habits. A new paper released by researchers at Brigham Young University today concludes that online role-playing games have a negative effect on marital satisfaction. However, the authors didn't prove that gaming has a particularly negative effect on relationships, only that it's just like any other leisure activity: doing too much of it without your spouse will make him or her feel angry and isolated.

In the study, 349 married couples who had one gaming member or two gaming members who logged unequal amounts of time filled out surveys about their relationships, with questions ranging from hours of gaming time logged to how often they fought. The study concluded that "for independent-gamer couples, the effects were clearly negative, resulting in frequent quarrelling over gaming." In couples where both people gamed, though in unequal amounts of time, 52 percent of the less-involved participants and 57 percent of the more-involved ones reported "often" or "always" speaking positively about gaming. Seventy-four percent of gaming couples even reported that gaming had a positive effect on their relationship.

However, blaming relationship problems on online gaming, while topical, is too narrow a description of the problem. The study explains in its intro that marital satisfaction is "lower for those [couples] with high concentrations of individual leisure activities." That is, doing fun stuff in general without your spouse will lead to fights and unrest.

This study doesn't prove that gaming, specifically, is to blame for your relationship problems. Couples where one member spends too much time fishing, shopping, drinking, or even volunteering at soup kitchens and building houses for the homeless on his or her own have been shown to experience marital difficulty, just like couples where one person games and the other doesn't. Since the study doesn't compare gaming to other leisure activities, it only confirms that gaming makes your spouse angry, like everything else you might do and enjoy alone.

There is one ray of light: while the study found that a married person's "satisfaction with online gaming" was a predictor of a discontent, the amount of time spent playing games was not. Therefore, if you aren't blessed with a gamer-to-gamer relationship, spend all the time playing you want—just don't grin like an idiot while you do it, and maybe even throw in a few complaints about what a slog it is to slay all those dragons.