Category: Relationships

A small shift in perspective can change how people handle conflict and improve emotional balance.

Focusing on the future can help couples deal with relationship conflicts. When people imagined how they would feel in one year’s time, they thought about and felt more positive about their relationships. Mr Alex Huynh, the lead author of the study, said:

“When romantic partners argue over things like finances, jealousy, or other interpersonal issues, they tend to employ their current feelings as fuel for a heated argument. By envisioning their relationship in the future, people can shift the focus away from their current feelings and mitigate conflicts.”

For the study, people thought back to a recent conflict with a friend or romantic partner. One group thought about how they felt in the moment. Another group imagined how they would feel one year in the future. Both groups then wrote about their relationships. An analysis of the text showed that thinking about the future had positive effects:

• People wrote more positively about their relationships.
• They used more words related to forgiveness and understanding.

The study highlights the importance of how people respond to conflict in relationships. Mr Huynh said:

“Our study demonstrates that adopting a future-oriented perspective in the context of a relationship conflict — reflecting on how one might feel a year from now — may be a valuable coping tool for one’s psychological happiness and relationship well-being.”

The trick of giving yourself a little psychological distance has all sorts of other benefits. It can help you generate self-insight, gain emotional control, improve self-control and even trigger wise thoughts.

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The study was published in Social Psychological and Personality Science (Huynh et al., 2016).

This type of couple were twice as likely to break up.

The most damaging relationship pattern is a dramatic style marked by emotional highs and lows and wildly fluctuating commitment.

Dramatic couples prefer doing things separately and tend to focus on each other’s negative qualities.

This type of couple is twice as likely to break up as those that fall into other categories.

Their relationships were the most likely to deteriorate over time.

One-third of couples in the study fell into the ‘dramatic’ category.

Dr Brian Ogolsky, the study’s first author, said:

“These couples have a lot of ups and downs, and their commitment swings wildly.

They tend to make decisions based on negative events that are occurring in the relationship or on discouraging things that they’re thinking about the relationship, and those things are likely to chip away at their commitment.”

These conclusions come from research involving 376 dating couples.

After tracking relationship commitment for nine months, the psychologists placed the couples into one of four categories.

Dr Ogolsky explained:

“The four types of dating couples that we found included the dramatic couple, the conflict-ridden couple, the socially involved couple, and the partner-focused couple.”

Partner-focused couples

In contrast to the dramatic type, the partner-focused couples — who made up around one-third of the sample — were the most likely to stay together.

Dr Ogolsky said:

“These partners are very involved with each other and dependent on each other, and they use what’s happening in their relationship to advance their commitment to deeper levels.

People in these couples had the highest levels of conscientiousness, which suggests that they are very careful and thoughtful about the way they approach their relationship choices.”

Conflicting couples

Couples that were full of conflict — 12 percent in this study — were still not as rocky as dramatic couples, the researchers found.

Dr Ogolsky said:

“These couples operate in a tension between conflict that pushes them apart and passionate attraction that pulls them back together.

This kind of love may not be sustainable in the long term–you’d go crazy if you had 30 to 50 years of mind-bending passion.

Partners may change from one group to another over time,”

Socially-involved couples

Like partner-focused couples, socially-involved couples (the remaining 19 percent) had very good relationships.

They shared a social network and used it to guide decisions about their commitment.

Dr Ogolsky said:

“Ideally long-term relationships should be predicated on friendship-based love.

And having mutual friends makes people in these couples feel closer and more committed.”

Couples can naturally move between these categories as their relationships develop over time.

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• 14 Essential Relationship Rules Every Couple Should Follow (P)

The study was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Ogolsky et al., 2015).