Which relationships last

This is a good reminder than you should be having frequent chats about what you want out of the relationship, and life, in regards to kids, marriage, jobs , and location. It probably goes without saying that being unhappy with your sex life can be a strain on your relationship and could even cause a split. But physical intimacy comes in many forms, all of which are important. Even if you're not getting it on every single night , showing even the slightest form of physical affection can keep the relationship strong.

Even non-sexual touching builds connection between partners. If you're committed to anyone for an extended period of time, you'll start to develop your own way of communicating and talking through things. If you and your partner are made for the long haul, not only will you have a specialized way of hashing things out, you'll have both thought through the way you're talking to each and made it a priority to speak to each other with care. Couples who are able to effectively communicate are able to better understand one another and experience greater intimacy.

For some people, the pain of admitting that they were wrong in an argument is akin to stepping on a Lego or biting into tinfoil. It's rough. But those in a healthy partnership will take a blow to their pride if it means ending an argument or letting their partner know that they are sorry, Hershenson said. If you and your partner seem to do this equally, and move on quickly, your relationship is built to last.

If you've been with your partner past the honeymoon stage, you should be holding little back from them. Of course we all want to protect our partners from some of our weirder thoughts and impulses, but if you truly feel comfortable to be yourself around them, then that's an important trait of a healthy partnership.

Having a long-term partnership means dealing with every aspect of that person. If you find yourself wanting to fix some major things about your significant other, then you're probably not meant to last the test of time.

When the researchers analyzed the data they gathered on the couples, they saw clear differences between the masters and disasters. The disasters looked calm during the interviews, but their physiology, measured by the electrodes, told a different story. Their heart rates were quick, their sweat glands were active, and their blood flow was fast. Following thousands of couples longitudinally, Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab, the quicker their relationships deteriorated over time.

But what does physiology have to do with anything? The problem was that the disasters showed all the signs of arousal—of being in fight-or-flight mode—in their relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger. Even when they were talking about pleasant or mundane facets of their relationships, they were prepared to attack and be attacked.

This sent their heart rates soaring and made them more aggressive toward each other. The masters, by contrast, showed low physiological arousal. They felt calm and connected together, which translated into warm and affectionate behavior, even when they fought. Gottman wanted to know more about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how the disasters squashed it. In a follow-up study in , he designed a lab on the University of Washington campus to look like a beautiful bed-and-breakfast retreat.

He invited newlywed couples to spend the day at this retreat and watched them as they did what couples normally do on vacation: cook, clean, listen to music, eat, chat, and hang out.

And Gottman made a crucial discovery in this study—one that gets at the heart of why some relationships thrive while others languish. The wife now has a choice. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship.

The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that. People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid.

These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. Only three in 10 of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can predict with up to 94 percent certainty whether couples—straight or gay, rich or poor, childless or not—will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and happy several years later.

Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. Part of HuffPost Relationships. All rights reserved. So how can you discern early on if this relationship actually has staying power or not? You feel comfortable being yourselves around each other.

Commitment may in some cases lead individuals to stay in relationships that they could leave, even though the costs of remaining in the relationship are very high. On the surface, this seems puzzling because people are expected to attempt to maximize their rewards in relationships and would be expected to leave them if they are not rewarding. But in addition to evaluating the outcomes that one gains from a given relationship, the individual also evaluates the potential costs of moving to another relationship or not having any relationship at all.

We might stay in a romantic relationship, even if the benefits of that relationship are not high, because the costs of being in no relationship at all are perceived as even higher. We may also remain in relationships that have become dysfunctional in part because we recognize just how much time and effort we have invested in them over the years.

Although the good news about interdependence and commitment is clear—they help relationships last longer—they also have a potential downside.

Breaking up, should it happen, is more difficult in relationships that are interdependent and committed. The closer and more committed a relationship has been, the more devastating a breakup will be. Although we have talked about it indirectly, we have not yet tried to define love itself—and yet it is obviously the case that love is an important part of many close relationships.

Social psychologists have studied the function and characteristics of romantic love, finding that it has cognitive, affective, and behavioral components and that it occurs cross-culturally, although how it is experienced may vary. The model, shown in Figure 7.

For instance, people who are good friends may have liking intimacy only or may have known each other so long that they also share commitment to each other companionate love.

Similarly, partners who are initially dating might simply be infatuated with each other passion only or may be experiencing romantic love both passion and liking but not commitment. The triangular model of love, proposed by Robert Sternberg.

Note that there are seven types of love, which are defined by the combinations of the underlying factors of intimacy, passion, and commitment. From Sternberg Lemieux and Hale gathered data on the three components of the theory from couples who were either casually dating, engaged, or married. They found that while passion and intimacy were negatively related to relationship length, that commitment was positively correlated with duration.

Reported intimacy and passion scores were highest for the engaged couples. As well as these differences in what love tends to look like in close relationships over time, there are some interesting gender and cultural differences here. In regards to cultural differences, on average, people from collectivistic backgrounds tend to put less emphasis on romantic love than people from more individualistic countries.

According to this idea, love helps couples work together to improve the relationship by coordinating and planning activities and by increasing commitment to the partnership. They predicted that the romantic love manipulation would decrease attention to faces of attractive opposite-sex people. One half of the participants the romantic love condition were assigned to write a brief essay about a time in which they experienced strong feelings of love for their current partner.

Participants assigned to the control condition wrote a brief essay about a time in which they felt extremely happy. After completing the essay, participants completed a procedure in which they were shown a series of attractive and unattractive male and female faces. The procedure assessed how quickly the participants could shift their attention away from the photo they were looking at to a different photo. The dependent variable was the reaction time in milliseconds with which participants could shift their attention.

Figure 7. Activating thoughts and feelings of romantic love reduced attention to faces of attractive alternatives. Attention to other social targets remained unaffected. Data are from Maner et al. As you can see in Figure 7. These findings suggest that romantic love may inhibit the perceptual processing of physical attractiveness cues—the very same cues that often pose a high degree of threat to the relationship. One of the important determinants of the quality of close relationships is the way that the partners relate to each other.

These approaches can be described in terms of attachment style — individual differences in how people relate to others in close relationships. Most children develop a healthy or secure attachment style , where they perceive their parents as safe, available, and responsive caregivers and are able to relate easily to them.

For these children, the parents successfully create appropriate feelings of affiliation and provide a secure base from which the child feels free to explore and then to return to. However, for children with unhealthy attachment styles, the family does not provide these needs.

These children are anxious about whether the parents will reciprocate closeness. Still other children become unable to relate to the parents at all, becoming distant, fearful, and cold the avoidant attachment style.

Fraley conducted a meta-analysis of 27 studies that had looked at the relationship between attachment behavior in infants and in adults over 17 years of age and found a significant correlation between the two measures.

A fourth infant attachment style has been identified more recently, the disorganized attachment style , which is a blend of the other two insecure styles. This style also shows some links to adulthood patterns, in this case an avoidant-fearful attachment style. They stay in relationships longer and are less likely to feel jealousy about their partners. But the relationships of anxious and avoidant partners can be more problematic.

One way to think about attachment styles, shown in Table 7. People with a secure attachment style have positive feelings about themselves and also about others. People with avoidant attachment styles feel good about themselves the goal of self-concern is being met , but they do not have particularly good relations with others.

They want to be liked, but they do not have a very positive opinion of themselves; this lack of self-esteem hurts their ability to form good relationships. The fourth cell in the table, lower right, represents the avoidant-fearful style, which describes people who are not meeting goals of either self-concern or other-concern.

This way of thinking about attachment shows, again, the importance of both self-concern and other-concern in successful social interaction.

People who cannot connect have difficulties being effective partners. But people who do not feel good about themselves also have challenges in relationships—self-concern goals must be met before we can successfully meet the goals of other-concern. Table 7. The quality of the relationships that people have with their parents and close friends will predict the quality of their romantic relationships. But although they are very important, attachment styles do not predict everything. There is also some diversity in the distribution of attachment styles across different groups.

For example, in a multicultural sample including people from over 50 different countries of origin, Agishtein and Brumbaugh found that attachment style varied as a function of ethnicity, religion, individualism-collectivism, and acculturation. For instance, anxious attachment was found to be significantly higher in those whose countries of origin were in East Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, compared with those from nations in South America, the Caribbean, North America, Western Europe, and South Asia.

These types of findings clearly remind us of the need to consider cultural diversity when we are reviewing the research on attachment. They also raise the interesting possibility that some types of attachment may be more normative and adaptive in some cultures than others.

As well as showing some cross-cultural diversity, attachment styles within individuals may be more diverse over time and across situations than previously thought. Some evidence suggests that overall attachment style in adults may not always predict their attachment style in specific relationships. As well as showing this variability across relationships, attachment styles can also shift over time and with changing relationship experiences.

These findings have many potential psychotherapeutic settings. For example, couples who are attending therapy to address relationship issues can benefit from this process in part by developing more secure attachments to each other Solomon, Therapists can also try to help their clients to develop a more secure attachment style, by creating a trusting and supportive relationship with them Obegi, As we saw in the chapter on Self, many of us are spending more time than ever connecting with others electronically.

Online close relationships are also becoming more popular. But you might wonder whether meeting and interacting with others online can create the same sense of closeness and caring that we experience through face-to-face encounters. And you might wonder whether people who spend more time on Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet might end up finding less time to engage in activities with the friends and loved ones who are physically close by Kraut et al.

In one study, Kraut et al. McKenna, Green, and Gleason found that many people who participated in news and user groups online reported having formed a close relationship with someone they had originally met on the Internet.

Over half of the participants said that they had developed a real-life relationship with people they had first met online, and almost a quarter reported that they had married, had become engaged to, or were living with someone they initially met on the Internet.

McKenna, Green, and Gleason studied how relationships developed online using laboratory studies. In their research, a previously unacquainted male and female college student met each other for the first time either in what they thought was an Internet chat room or face-to-face. Those who met first on the Internet reported liking each other more than those who met first face-to-face—even when it was the same partner that they had met both times.

There are probably a number of reasons why Internet relationships can be so successful. For one, relationships grow to the extent that the partners self-disclose by sharing personal information with each other, and the relative anonymity of Internet interactions may allow people to self-disclose more readily.

When physical attractiveness is taken out of the picture, people may be more likely to form relationships on the basis of other more important characteristics, such as similarity in values and beliefs.

The Internet also may be helpful in finding others with shared interests and values. Finally, the major purpose of many Internet activities is to make new friends. In contrast, most face-to-face interactions are less conducive to starting new conversations and friendships. Online interactions can also help to strengthen offline relationships.

They found that offline discussions between partners often preceded going FBO, and, that once couples had gone FBO, they reported more perceived relationship commitment and stability. Overall, then, the evidence suggests that rather than being an isolating activity, interacting with others over the Internet helps us maintain close ties with our family and friends and in many cases helps us form intimate and rewarding relationships.

Now that you have a better idea of the variables that lead to interpersonal attraction and that are important in close relationships, you should be getting a pretty good idea of the things that partners need to do to help them stay together. It is true that many marriages end in divorce, and this number is higher in individualistic cultures, where the focus is on the individual, than it is in collectivistic cultures, where the focus is on maintaining group togetherness. Successful relationships take work, but the work is worth it.

People who are happily married are also happier overall and have better psychological and physical health. Partners who are able to remain similar in their values and other beliefs are going to be more successful.

This seems to have been the case for Frank and Anita—they continued to share activities and interests. Partners must also display positive affect toward each other. Anita and Frank talked in their interview about how their time together was characterized by positive feelings and romance, and perhaps that helped them stay together.

Next, the partners must share, in the sense that they are willing to express their thoughts about each other. Successful relationships involve individuals self-disclosing their own needs and desires, which allows their partners to become aware of their needs and attempt to meet them if possible. If the partners are not able to express their concerns, then the relationship cannot become more intimate.

Successful relationships have successful communication patterns. Finally, but not least important, are sexual behaviors. Compatibility of sexual preferences and attitudes are an important predictor of relationship success. For instance, it is very important that partners are on the same page about how they feel about pursuing sex outside of the relationship, as infidelity in relationships is linked to increased risk of divorce Wiederman,