Have you ever wished you could predict if a relationship will last? It would be handy, wouldn’t it? No more heartbreaking anguish over breakups…
Mom & Dad, 49 years
This month my parents celebrated their 49th anniversary, and it got me to wondering what makes some relationships last while others wither away or crash and burn. Relationships aren’t all wine and roses, though that doesn’t hurt. So how do you know if yours will last?
Ronald D. Rogge, at the University of Rochester, has been doing research on relationships, and in particular, on the early years of marriage. In a study recently published in Psychological Science, the journal for the Association for Psychological Science, Rogge and two colleagues (Soonhee Lee and Harry T. Reis) examined if it was possible to predict the likelihood of a relationship lasting, or ending, within the next year.
The challenge with most “relationship prediction” studies is that they rely on the participants telling the researchers how they feel about their partner. The problem, of course, is that not everyone knows themselves well enough to be accurate. There’s also the challenge of being able to honestly share their feelings. For example, someone may be beginning to feel less happy in a relationship, but might not be able to identify the feelings as having to do with the relationship vs. something else, or may be reluctant to admit their changing feelings for any number of reasons.
This research goes beyond what someone might say about their partner, to how they actually respond to positive and negative associations with their partner. To do this, the researchers used a technique often used to assess racism and bias (feelings people definitely have trouble admitting to themselves and to researchers).
The study included 222 volunteers, all of whom were involved in a romantic relationship. The volunteers supplied their partner’s first name and two other words that related to the partner, like a pet name or a distinctive characteristic. Then they watched a monitor as three types of words were presented one at a time – good words (like peace, vacation, or sharing), bad words (such as death, tragedy, and criticizing), and partner-related words (names or traits).
This was a word association method, with two different tasks. In the first task, volunteers were to press the space bar whenever they saw either good words or partner-related words, and in the second, where the combination was bad words and partner words. The premise is that this would get at people’s automatic reactions to the words – before they really “thought” about it and had a chance to censor themselves. If they have generally good associations with their partners, they should be able to do the first task more easily than the second.
The researchers found that volunteers who found it easy to associate their partner with bad things and difficult to associate the partner with good things were more likely to separate over the next year. The researchers also asked volunteers to report on the strength of their relationships at the start of the study – and found that the new test (the word association) did a much better job of predicting breakup. “It really is giving us a unique glimpse into how people were feeling about their partners – giving us information that they were unable or unwilling to report,” says Rogge.
What does this mean for the average person not engaged in a research study? Well, it’s probably not all that handy to give your partner a word association test – at least not in a controlled situation. Of course that may not be so far away. Even so, I’ll bet you have an intuitive sense of the truth anyway, right? The question is…are you listening to your intuition?
What do you think about this research and what it tells us? Let us know in the comment section below.
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