There’s nothing better to me than tailgating on a Fall afternoon. Unless I can add my significant other. My wife, Meredith David and I both attended the University of South Carolina and spent many Saturday afternoons enjoying the tailgating scene at Williams Brice stadium. We formed memories to this day that help strengthen our relationship and marriage.

My wife is a Marketing Phd now at Baylor University and we teamed up to see if our hypothesis was true, that if you tailgate together you’ll stay together.  We took her research abilities and then leveraged Tailgating Challenge to help survey tailgaters and see if our thoughts would be true about tailgating and relationships.

“I noticed how at tailgates people actually interact with each other and are not glued to their phones like we see in restaurants and many other settings,” David said. “This led us to combine our expertise to study the impact of tailgating together on well-being.”

The researchers surveyed 143 tailgating adults (44 percent were female) who answered questions about their partners and their respect toward that person. The results show that individuals who tailgate with their significant other report higher levels of respect and relationship satisfaction, David said. We will be traveling to Asheville, NC in September 2019 to present the results of the study at the Atlantic Marketing Association Conference.

“Tailgating fosters the human-to-human, face-to-face interactions and connections that we as humans need but yet find hard to come by as a result of cellphones and ‘phubbing’ tendencies,” David said.

With over 70 million people tailgating annually, spending on average $150 on each occasion, David said this research offers important guidance for marketers, particularly in terms of positioning strategies in marketing communications for tailgating-related products and events.

My wife has shared that we knew that tailgating strengthened our relationship, but we wanted to dig in to see if it was – or could be – helpful to others.

“We have lived and experienced these effects ourselves, so we wanted to determine if this impacted others the same way,” she said. “We found that tailgating helps strengthen relationships, in part, by helping people escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life. They disconnect from their TVs, laptops and cellphones and make real connections with loved ones and friends.

Its safe to say that if you want to strengthen you’re relationship or potentially find love, then its time to get out there and tailgate!

Let us know how tailgating has improved your relationship and tag us in pics with you significant other at the tailgate.

See the original press release