Category: Relationships

Two factors that help keep long distance relationships alive are that these couples:

• Tell each other more intimate information.
• Have a more idealised view of their partner.

The study, which contradicts much standard dating advice, was inspired by the increasing numbers of people conducting long distance relationships because of the demands of education, employment or emigration.

The researchers examined 67 couples: some who were in long distance relationships, and others who were in close physical proximity to each other.

They found that the long distance couples were highly trusting and even felt more intimate with their partners, despite their physical distance.

Crystal Jiang explained:

“…our culture emphasizes being together physically and frequent face-to-face contact for close relationships, but long-distance relationships clearly stand against all these values.

People don’t have to be so pessimistic about long-distance romance.

The long-distance couples try harder than geographically close couples in communicating affection and intimacy, and their efforts do pay back.”

It shows that, while it is not necessarily ideal to be separated from your partner for long periods of time, people do find ways to cope with the situation.

Other studies have also found that, although those in long distance relationships talk with each other less, what they do say is imbued with greater meaning.

This appears to balance out the lack of physical contact.

This means those in long distance relationships often have similar levels of relationship satisfaction and stability as those who are geographically close to each other.

None of this research, though, tells us anything about which types of people can cope with long distance relationships.

While some people may naturally have the skills required, others may not.

Still, it’s heartening to know that should a long distance relationship be unavoidable, many people are able to keep their intimacy levels high, which helps fuel the relationship, just as if they lived in the same house.

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What makes people stay in relationships and what makes them want to leave?

People who are married or just dating give similar reasons for wanting to leave their partner.

These are (1) issues with their partner’s personality, (2) a breach of trust (often, cheating) and (3) partner becoming distant or disconnected.

People give slightly different reasons for wanting to stay together.

For people who are married, the top reasons to stay together are the investment they have already made in the relationship, family responsibilities and the barriers to leaving (e.g. financial).

You can tell these are people who have been together for an average of 9 years — the responses are kind of negative.

Top of the reasons to stay for those dating included liking their partner’s personality, feeling close and the positive emotions from the relationship.

In other words, these are couples who have been together for an average of two years and haven’t had kids yet.

Professor Samantha Joel, who led the study, said:

“Most of the research on breakups has been predictive, trying to predict whether a couple stays together or not, but we don’t know much about the decision process — what are the specific relationship pros and cons that people are weighing out.”

Around half the people in the study had both reasons to stay and reasons to leave.

Professor Joel said:

“What was most interesting to me was how ambivalent people felt about their relationships.

They felt really torn.

Breaking up can be a really difficult decision.

You can look at a relationship from outside and say ‘you have some really unsolvable problems, you should break up’ but from the inside that is a really difficult thing to do and the longer you’ve been in a relationship, the harder it seems to be.”

Most people said they had relationship deal-breakers, but these are often forgotten when they meet someone.

Professor Joel said:

“Humans fall in love for a reason.

From an evolutionary perspective, for our ancestors finding a partner may have been more important than finding the right partner.

It might be easier to get into relationships than to get back out of them.”

The study was published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science (Joel et al., 2017).

Includes research on the secrets partners keep from each other, signs of healthy marriages and what children to relationships.

Almost 90 percent of people keep small, mundane secrets from their partners, it turns out.

This is just one of the most fascinating insights from recent psychology studies on relationships covered here on PsyBlog.

The researchers conclude that these little secrets may even benefit relationships in certain ways.

Find out about this and other intriguing psychology studies on relationships from the members-only section of PsyBlog:

(If you are not already, find out how to become a PsyBlog member here.)

1. 90% Of People Keep These Little Secrets From Their Partners
2. The Positive Signs Of The Most Healthy Relationships
3. The Relationship Pattern Linked To Depression And Anxiety
4. Why Men Suffer More Physically From Divorce And Separation
5. Brain Scans Can Predict Marital Satisfaction
6. What Having Children Does To Your Relationship
7. The 3 Healthiest Traits For Your Partner

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This attachment style can be damaging to relationships.

People who feel strong connections to fictional characters in TV shows are more likely to have relationship issues, research suggests.

Fictional TV shows and movies may provide a ‘safe space’ in which people with relationship problems can work them out.

By thinking about their favourite character, they can imagine what they might do in the same situation.

People high in anxious-avoidant attachment were especially likely to strongly identify with fictional characters.

Anxious-avoidant people desire intimacy, but display avoidant behaviour that tends to damage their relationship.

Classic examples of avoidant behaviours include not returning calls, not expressing love, mocking partner’s attempts at intimacy and ‘forgetting’ plans.

Mr Nathan Silver, the study’s first author, said:

“We can do a lot more with stories than just escape into them.

For people with attachment issues, movies and TV shows can be a way to try to understand their problems or to vicariously meet their needs for intimacy in a way that they may find difficult in real life.”

Escape to a virtual world

For the study, 1,039 Americans were asked about their relationship problems and TV habits.

Anxious-avoidant people were most strongly connected to characters in TV shows, the results showed.

They were more likely to:

• become transported or absorbed in the story,
• more likely to imagine different choices for the character,
• and imagine knowing a fictional character personally.

Mr Silver explained the problem that faces anxious-avoidant people in their relationships:

“These are the classic self-sabotagers.

They really want supportive intimacy, but tend to screw it up because they also have these avoidance behaviors.

What the story world provides these people is a safe place to deal with this ambivalence.

That’s why I believe they are engaging more in the story world.”

Fiction provides a virtual world to try out possibilities, said Mr Silver:

“What our results suggest is that people with these issues can use the story world to think about how they would react if they had the chance.

They expand their social experiences, at least vicariously.”

Avoiding emotional experience

Unfortunately, the study doesn’t tell us whether using TV shows and movies in this way is beneficial or not to people with attachment issues.

However, other research has found that individuals with insecure attachment styles are more likely to use television as a way to avoid their own emotional experiences, which can be detrimental, depending on the circumstances (Greenwood, 2008).

Alternatively, some shows may provide a sense of vicarious emotional connection and validation for people with insecure attachment styles, who may struggle to form healthy, secure relationships in their own lives.

In other words, for some people, TV may function as a distraction from real relationship problems and/or as a method of filling a void.

The study was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (Silver & Slater, 2019).

This unconscious process is one of the secrets that helps happy couples stay faithful.

People in relationships automatically see tempting others as less attractive, research finds.

The more satisfied people are with their relationship, the more they downgrade attractive others.

The unconscious process may help couples stay faithful to each other.

Dr Shana Cole, the study’s first author, said:

“Misperceiving attractive people who represent threats to the relationship as less attractive may help people resist the inclination to pursue them.

This is especially important since finding someone physically attractive is a primary reason why people choose to date or romantically pursue someone.”

A healthy defence mechanism

The research on 131 heterosexual couples showed them various pictures of the opposite sex manipulated to be more or less attractive.

Sometimes study participants were told they were single, other times that they were in a relationship.

When told the person in the profile was single, people in relationships downgraded their attractiveness.

They did this automatically as a defensive mechanism to protect their own relationship.

When told the person in the profile was in a relationship, though, the defensive mechanism did not operate.

In contrast, those not in relationships were unaffected by the relationship status of the profile.

Dr Emily Balcetis, one of the study’s co-authors, said:

“In today’s world, it can be difficult to stick it out with one long-term partner.

This work suggests that there are processes that may take place outside of conscious awareness to make it easier to stay committed to one’s own partner.”

Dr Cole said:

“There are still several questions that are left open.

Future research could see whether perceiving intriguing and available individuals as less attractive affects behavior toward the individual.

It’s possible that if we see tempting others as unattractive, we will flirt less with them or be more reluctant to give out our phone number.”

How to stay faithful

Here are some other strategies that may help couples stay faithful:

1. Communicating openly and honestly with each other about feelings, needs, and boundaries.
2. Building and maintaining trust through consistency and transparency.
3. Prioritizing the relationship and making an effort to spend quality time together.
4. Being committed to working through challenges and conflicts.
5. Practicing healthy coping mechanisms for dealing with stress, rather than turning to infidelity as a solution.
6. Being respectful of each other’s boundaries and independence.
7. Fostering a sense of emotional and physical intimacy in the relationship.

→ Related articles:

• A Basic Way To Spot A Relationship Cheat
• 3 Personality Traits Associated With Infidelity
• How To Get Over Infidelity And Become Stronger

The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Cole et al., 2016).

Look for these signs of a successful relationship.

Being ‘ready for commitment’ is a clear sign of relationship success, research finds.

Being ready for commitment makes people do the work required to keep a relationship going.

Those who are ‘commitment ready’ are 25 percent less likely to break up over time.

Four common signs of commitment include:

1. Your partner makes sacrifices for you, such as changing their schedule, doing thing you like but they don’t and really listening to your problems.
2. Making long-term plans for the future that include you both.
3. You both have similar perceptions about the relationship, as do your friends and family.
4. Real commitments are things that you do. Commitment is usually obvious — watch their behaviour.

Professor Chris Agnew, the study’s first author, said:

“Feeling ready leads to better relational outcomes and well-being.

When a person feels more ready, this tends to amplify the effect of psychological commitment on relationship maintenance and stability.”

The conclusions come from a study of over 400 adults in relationships.

All were asked about their sense of whether this was the right time for a relationship, how satisfied they were with it and how much investment they had made.

The results showed that readiness was strongly linked to commitment.

In other words, people tended to commit to a relationship when they felt ready for it.

However, when they didn’t feel ready, they did not do the work required to keep the relationship alive.

Professor Agnew said:

“People’s life history, relationship history, and personal preferences all play a role.

One’s culture also transmits messages that may signal that one is more or less ready to commit.”

The study will be published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (Agnew et al., 2019).

Men’s choice of pick up lines may help quickly select for women with particular personalities.

When it comes to the human mating game, men are often portrayed as having little power or guile.

Research finds it is women that control early interactions, from first signalling the man to approach to deciding whether to engage in sex.

One area in which men are popularly seen as especially inept is in their choice of pick up lines.

Leading the field in crass openings are sexually-loaded remarks.

Indeed, a study by Chris Bale from the University of Central Lancashire found that sexually-loaded remarks were the type of openers least likely to lead to further interaction (Bale, 2006).

Which begs the question: why do men still use them?

Pick up lines as selection tool

An ingeniously simple answer is suggested by both Bale (2006) and Cooper et al (2007), with some evidence to back it up.

Pick up lines may be a way for men to select for a particular type of woman.

In other words, men using sexually-loaded remarks are looking for a certain type of woman.

Similarly, at the other end of the scale, men who use character-revealing or culture-based pick up lines are probably trying to show they are a good mate looking for a long-term partner.

That’s the theory and here’s how Cooper and colleagues searched for evidence.

The study first asked participants to consider a series of scenarios in which men tried to strike up a conversation with a woman.

In each the man used a different type of pick up line.

Participants were then asked to rate how likely it was the conversation would continue on the basis of that pick up line.

These pick up lines were collated from a variety of sources and clustered into the following categories:

1. Good mate – these pick up lines included comments that made reference to culture, character or wealth. E.g. “You know I saw this fantastic piece in the Tate Modern”.
2. Compliments. E.g. “You remind me of a parking ticket because you’ve got fine written all over you.” (Please. No!)
3. Sex. E.g. “I may not be Fred Flintstone, but I can sure make your bedrock.” (Club to the head.)
4. Humour. “Can I buy you an island?” (Nice.)

So, now we know, generally speaking, how our female participants react to these four broad types of pick up lines.

Next we need to find out what types of men the female participants prefer.

Four types of men

For this they completed the Dating Partner Preference Test.

An analysis of these results suggests women see men as generally falling into one of four types:

1. Nice guy. Yes, he’s helpful, he’s considerate, he’s appreciative. He’s a puppy.
2. Provider. Man go into woods, kill pig. Bring fire. Build log cabin. All warm and fed.
3. Leader. He’s chatty, confident and strong-willed – a captain of your heart?
4. Bad mate. Fickle, conceited, dependent. All wrong for you. But there’s something about him…

Along with these vignettes and the Dating Partner Preference Test, participants were asked to fill in personality measures of their psychoticism (tendency for inappropriate emotional responses and recklessness), extraversion (being outgoing, gregarious, externally oriented) and neuroticism (the tendency to experience negative emotional states).

Now we’ve got all the information we need to see if there’s any connection.

Results

Looking at the correlations shows there is support for the idea that pick up lines select for women with particular personalities.

• Women high in extraversion preferred the male ‘leaders’.
• Women high in neuroticism preferred the ‘nice guys’.
• Women high in psychoticism rejected ‘nice guys’, preferring the ‘bad mate’.

It does seem, then, that the type of pick up lines men choose does have a measurable effect on the type of women who respond to them.

This can effectively allow men to make a quick assessment of a woman’s personality by their response to a particular type of approach.

Those looking for a ‘bad mate’ might use a sexually-loaded remark or a compliment, while those wanting an extrovert should use a joke.

Men’s perceptions of women’s lines

I have focussed on women’s perceptions of male pick up lines as in most cultures it’s mostly the men using the lines, although this is changing.

Perhaps to reflect this men’s perceptions of women’s pick up lines were also included in this study.

The results for men’s perceptions showed that in comparison to women, men were more likely to prefer pick up lines involving sex (surprise surprise!) as opposed to women who preferred humour.

Men also tended to be worse than women at judging what types of pick up lines women prefer.

The types of pick up lines whose effectiveness was under-estimated by men were those involving offers of help to women, handing control of the interaction to women and (subtly) displaying wealth (surprise surprise!).

Examples of direct pick up lines

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that men prefer pick up lines to be direct.

But, do men and women agree on what a direct approach is and why such directness is necessary in the first place?

These questions are addressed in a study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Wade et al., 2009).

Forty women aged between 19 and 22 were asked to list the types of pick up lines they might use to signal their interest in dating a man.

Researchers sorted these pick up lines into 10 categories, then 40 men and women rated them in order of perceived directness.

Here are the 10 categories (with examples) from most to least direct pick up lines:

1. Directly ask out on a date: Want to go get dinner?
2. Ask if single: Do you have a girlfriend?
3. Give out phone number, or ask for a call: You should call me.
4. Give a compliment: I like your hair.
5. Ask about shared interests: Do you watch The Wire?
6. Indirectly hint at a date: What are you doing later this weekend?
7. Say something funny/sexual humour: Wanna make out?
8. Suggest familiarity: Have we met before?
9. Personal interest questions: How was your weekend?
10. Subtle hello: Hey, what’s your name?

Then men were asked which pick up lines they thought would be most effective for women to use on them.

They pretty much put the pick up lines in order of directness, with the most direct also perceived as the most effective.

When women were asked to do the same they produced a similar list with one exception.

Women didn’t rate as highly giving out phone numbers or asking for a call.

Overall, though, women clearly understand that men prefer the direct approach.

The only surprise is the low ranking of funny or sexual humour.

Men don’t seem to appreciate the lewd come-ons suggested by gender stereotypes.

This relatively low rating for a jokey approach is another thing shared by both sexes.

Previous work by Bale et al. (2006) found that women weren’t particularly impressed with men trying to be funny, despite what we are often told.

It seems opening lines are a serious business for both sexes.

Why men prefer women to be direct

The interesting question, although it may seem easy to answer, is why do men prefer a direct approach?

Two obvious answers are men’s purported inability to read body language or an assumed distaste for reading situational subtleties (in other words: too stupid or can’t be bothered).

But researchers in Germany provide us with evidence for an alternative explanation.

Grammer et al. (2000) videotaped opposite sex pairs meeting for the first time to catch the nuances of body language in the first 10 minutes of an interaction.

Afterwards women were asked how much interest they had in the man they’d been talking to.

The researchers revealed two counter-intuitive results:

• In the first minute women behaved no differently to men they fancied than those they didn’t. They sent many positive nonverbal signals to all the men and hardly any negative signals.
• It is only between the 4th and 10th minute that any correlation was seen between an increased sending of positive nonverbal behaviours and wanting to date the man. But even then the difference was only between some positive signals and slightly more positive signals. Again negative signals were very rare.

The reason men prefer a direct approach becomes clearer.

Women may think they are sending out all the right nonverbal signals and may blame men for failing to pick up on them.

But from a man’s perspective there may often be little to pick up on because women, being polite, are always sending positive nonverbal signals.

While it’s not good practice to generalise too much from one relatively small study of 45 participants whose age ranged from 18 to 23, the results accord with what men say anecdotally: they often can’t tell if women are interested or not because the signals are too ambiguous.

So subtlety is out and it’s back to the age-old problem for both men and women: who has the guts to risk rejection with the direct approach?

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Searching for someone who exactly matches your ideals may be a waste of time.

People desire positive traits in a partner, but it probably does not matter exactly which ones they get, research reveals.

The study found that when selecting a partner, people tend to ignore their own top three traits and are equally happy with someone who has a different set of positive traits.

For example, people say they want intelligence and kindness, but are just as happy with a sense of humour and ambition.

Dr Jehan Sparks, the study’s first author, said:

“The people in our study could very easily list their top three attributes in an ideal partner.

We wanted to see whether those top three attributes really mattered for the person who listed them.

As it turns out, they didn’t.”

For the research, over 700 people were asked to list their ideal traits in a partner.

These traits were then compared to people they actually knew and with how attractive they were.

The results showed that people did prefer others who had the traits they had listed as most attractive.

So far, so predictable.

Professor Paul Eastwick, study co-author, said:

“On the surface, this looks promising.

You say you want these three attributes, and you like the people who possess those attributes.

But the story doesn’t end there.”

However, people were equally attracted to other people who had different positive traits.

Dr Sparks explained:

“So in the end, we want partners who have positive qualities, but the qualities you specifically list do not actually have special predictive power for you.”

Professor Eastwick said:

“Why do we order off the menu for ourselves?

Because it seems obvious that I will like what I get to pick.

Our findings suggest that, in the romantic domain, you might as well let a random stranger order for you—you’re just as likely to end up liking what you get.”

Searching for someone who exactly matches your ideals may be a waste of time, says Dr Sparks:

“It’s really easy to spend time hunting around online for someone who seems to match your ideals.

But our research suggests an alternative approach: Don’t be too picky ahead of time about whether a partner matches your ideals on paper.

Or, even better, let your friends pick your dates for you.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Sparks et al., 2020).