Category: Relationships

It makes it easier to build intimacy and get greater fulfilment.

Being true to yourself is the key to a happy and healthy relationship.

People who see themselves objectively and clearly and act consistently with those beliefs have more positive relationships.

Dr Amy Brunell, the study’s first author, said:

“If you’re true to yourself, it is easier to act in ways that build intimacy in relationships, and that’s going to make your relationship more fulfilling.”

The study involved 62 heterosexual couples who were asked about what psychologists call their ‘dispositional authenticity’.

This included questions like: “For better or for worse, I am aware of who I truly am.”

The results showed that men and women who reported being more true to themselves behaved in more intimate ways and they felt more positive about their relationship.

Dr Brunell said:

“Typically in dating and marital relationships, the women tend to be ‘in charge’ of intimacy in the relationship.

So when men have this dispositional authenticity, and want to have an open, honest relationship, it makes women’s job easier — they can more easily regulate intimacy.”

Dr Brunell said that it wasn’t just about accepting flaws in yourself, but being aware of limitations:

“It shouldn’t be a surprise, but being true to yourself is linked to having healthier and happier relationships for both men and women.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Brunell et al., 2010).

Continuously questioning a relationship wears both partners down.

Being highly sensitive to rejection is damaging to relationships.

People who are sensitive to rejection frequently think about their partner leaving them.

They worry that revealing their true self will lead to rejection.

This means that they are constantly on the lookout for any signs of displeasure in their partner.

The continuous questioning of the relationship wears both partners down.

Naturally, then, this thinking style is linked to lower levels of relationship satisfaction, the psychological research reveals.

Pre-emptive rejection

The results come from a study of 217 young people who had been in relationships for at least three weeks.

They were asked about how sensitive they were to rejection with a scenario like:

“Lately you’ve been noticing some distance between yourself and your significant other, and you ask him/her if there is something wrong.”

Then they were asked:

“How concerned or anxious would you be over whether or not he/she still loves you and wants to be with you?”

The more anxious people are in these sorts of situations, the higher their fear of rejection.

One typical reaction of people who fear being rejected is to reject the other person first by cutting them off.

It’s like a pre-emptive strike.

Emotionally cutting the other person off, though, turns out to be a bad move, the researchers found.

People who did this were even less satisfied with their relationship.

The authors explain:

“Although individuals are attempting to reduce the potential for rejection, distance also reduces the potential for fulfilling, accepting, and intimate behavior.”

In other words, by pushing the other person away, you are hurting yourself to try and avoid hurting yourself — which clearly makes no sense.

Dealing with insecurity

Other typical reactions to perceived rejection are coercion and compliance.

The study’s authors explain:

“Coercion involves verbally and/or physically aggressive acts meant to force romantic partners to remain in the relationship.

Similarly, compliance involves giving in to one’s romantic partner’s potentially harmful or unhealthy demands to prevent further rejection.”

Both of these are also poor ways to deal with feelings of insecurity.

Instead, the best way to deal with being sensitive to rejection is to be aware of it and when it is happening.

Awareness is the first step to changing a behaviour.

Sensitivity to rejection frequently goes along with a weak sense of self.

This is especially prevalent among young people whose identities are not yet strongly formed.

People with stronger and better developed identities tend not to fear rejection as much.

They have an ability to balance their dependence and independence healthily.

Psychologists call this ‘self-differentiation’.

The study was published in the journal Couple And Family Psychology: Research And Practice (Norona & Welsh, 2016).

Happy couples unconsciously share this linguistic habit. Are you doing it?

Couples are more likely to match their language when their relationship is going well, research finds.

Using the same patterns of words or turns of phrase suggests a couple are in sync.

The reason is something psychologists call ‘language style matching’.

Professor James Pennebaker, who led the study, explained:

“When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds.

This also happens when people read a book or watch a movie.

As soon as the credits roll, they find themselves talking like the author or the central characters.”

The study’s authors tracked the changes in the language of poets and writers over the years and how it reflected their relationship.

For example, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung wrote to each other weekly for around 7 years.

Their relationship was tempestuous and this is reflected at the very basic level of language use, well below the meaning of words.

The study tracked the use of common words, including pronouns, prepositions and articles like “I”, “into”, and “the”.

Because the words are so common, it is easier to track changes in style.

When their relationship was solid, their use of these words was more similar.

Towards the end, when Freud and Jung had fallen out, their styles no longer matched.

Dr Molly Ireland, the study’s first author, said:

“Because style matching is automatic, it serves as an unobtrusive window into people’s close relationships with others.”

The researchers saw the same pattern emerge in the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, whose relationship was rocky, to say the least.

The language both used in their poems changed over the years to reflect the state of their relationship, the researchers found.

Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning showed the same changes in their poetry as their relationship changed over time.

Dr Ireland said:

“Style words in the spouses’ poems were more similar during happier periods of their relationships and less synchronized toward each relationship’s end.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Ireland et al., 2010).

Couples doing this were less likely to argue and were more committed to each other.

Small acts of kindness are one of the simplest ways to improve a relationship, psychological research finds.

Making a cup of coffee, being respectful, showing affection and being forgiving are easy ways to demonstrate generosity.

Partners who are generous to each other are less likely to argue, to divide housework fairly and to be more committed to each other.

Generous people are seen as more desirable partners.

Being generous also benefits the person being generous: it makes them feel more satisfied with the relationship.

The study analysed data from a US survey of almost 3,000 married couples aged 18 to 45.

They were asked about their marital conflict, the potential for divorce and the generosity of their partner.

The study’s authors explain the results:

“…spouses’ reports of generosity toward the participants were associated with participants’ reports of marital quality.

Specifically, spouses’ generosity was positively associated with participants’ reports of marital satisfaction and negatively associated with participants’ reports of conflict and subjective
divorce likelihood.”

Being generous benefited both partners, the study showed:

“We also found that participants’ reports of behaving in a generous fashion toward their spouse were linked to their own reports of marital quality.

The extension of generosity toward the spouse was positively related to their own reports of marital satisfaction and negatively associated with their own reports of conflict and subjective divorce likelihood.”

In fact, wives seem to get a particular benefit from being generous to their husbands, the study revealed:

“…wives reported lower levels of marital satisfaction when they also reported low levels of generosity toward their spouse.

These findings were robust to the inclusion of spousal
reports of generosity in the same model, and
they were present in all four types of analyses.”

The study was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Dew & Wilcox, 2013).

Certain types of anxiety can cause massive ups and downs in relationships.

“For people anxious in their attachments, they have anxiety as to whether the person is going to be there for them and whether they are worthy of others.I was interested in how attachment security impacted partners’ experiences in their relationship on a daily basis.Some couples experience instability from one day to the next in their relationship, so we sought out to explore what could increase or decrease this volatility.”

“For the average person, stay attuned to what your partner is saying and avoid making assumptions that can escalate conflict.Trusting in your partner and your relationship is important to daily interactions and stability for your relationship.”

Learning these two skills will help your relationship last.

Forgiveness is one vital skill for improving relationships, research concludes.

The other is enhancing relationships through positive thinking and behaviour, both together or individually.

This includes talking about the relationship in a positive way and doing fun activities together.

Learning these skills — forgiveness and enhancing the relationship — will help the partnership last.

Managing conflict is often done when the relationship is under threat, explained Dr Brian Ogolsky, the study’s first author:

“Threats to the relationship come from all kinds of different places.

Generally, there are many threats early in relationships that can cause problems, but that is not to say that these disappear later.

We know couples cheat in the long-term, people end up in new workplaces and in new situations where possible alternative partners show up, conflicts arise, or a lack of willingness to sacrifice time for your partner emerges.”

The key is forgiveness, said Dr Ogolsky:

“Good conflict management or forgiving our partner for doing something wrong is an interactive process.

When a threat comes in, we can do one of two things: we can ditch our partner or forgive them over time.”

Alongside conflict management, both partners need to be working on improving the relationship.

Dr Ogolsky said:

“Individually, even the act of thinking about our relationship can be enhancing.

Whereas engaging in leisure activities together, talking about the state of our relationship, these are all interactive.”

Well functioning relationships are a state of mind:

“We are doing something to convince ourselves that this is a good relationship and therefore it’s good for our relationship.

Things like positive illusions, the idea that we can believe our relationship is better than it is or that our partner is better than he or she is.

We can do that without our partner.”

The conclusions come from a review of around 250 separate studies on relationship maintenance .

The study was published in the Journal of Family Theory & Review (Ogolsky et al., 2017).