People in the study who had experienced a recent break-up had done everything to remove that person from their lives.
Around one-in-three adolescents are thought to experience abuse from a romantic partner.
The study asked people to rank the eight top attributes of a potential partner.
23 percent of women admitted to making “foodie calls”.
The effect of snooping around your partner’s phone.
The skill is linked to much better long-term marital satisfaction.
How social media could be damaging your relationship — and what to do about it.
People were given a stress test involving putting their hand into cold water.
Learning these two skills will help your relationship last.
Learning these two skills will help your relationship last.
Forgiveness is one vital skill for improving relationships, new 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).
People gained weight despite eating more healthily.
People gained weight despite eating more healthily.
Being in a settled relationship increases the chances of weight gain, new research finds.
Over the 10 years of the study, couples put on more weight than single people.
The weight gain occurred despite couples eating more healthily, including consuming more fruits and vegetables.
It may be partly because couples feel free to ‘let themselves go’.
Having children may increase weight gain even more as parents tend to eat their snacks and leftovers.
The study’s authors write:
“…couples were more likely [than single people] to meet recommendations for fruit, vegetable, fast food and alcohol consumption, and they were more likely to be a non-smoker.
These findings are consistent with the results from previous research showing that being in a committed romantic relationship is associated with health promoting behaviours.”
The conclusions come from a study of 15,001 people in Australia who were followed for 10 years.
The results showed that couples put on more weight than single people in this period.
It may be partly because people tend to eat more together than they do alone:
“…whilst family meals may include more healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables and less fast food, people often consume larger portion sizes and more calories in the company of others than they do alone
[…]Further, the unhealthy but tempting eating habits of one spouse may migrate to the other.
For example, [one study] showed that husbands detrimentally influence the diet of their wives by increasing the consumption of fat and meat.”
Couples are also usually less concerned with attracting a partner, the authors write:
“Another interesting explanation is the marriage-market theory which suggests that married people who are no longer concerned with attracting a mate gain weight.
Entry into cohabitation or marriage is associated with a decline in the desire to maintain weight for the purpose of attracting a mate.”
The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE (Schoeppe et al., 2018).
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