Relationship research: happiness is not a match made in heaven

Sure, Aristotle may have said, “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” But thinking that you and your partner were made in heaven for each other can hurt your relationship, researchers say.

These two ways of thinking about relationships are particularly interesting, say study authors and social psychologists Spike W. S. Lee of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Southern California, because they have the power to highlight or downplay the damaging effect of conflicts on relationship evaluation.

After all, if two people were really made in heaven for each other, why should they have any conflicts?

"Our findings corroborate prior research showing that people who implicitly think of relationships as perfect unity between soulmates have worse relationships than people who implicitly think of relationships as a journey of growing and working things out,” says Lee. “Apparently, different ways of talking and thinking about love relationship lead to different ways of evaluating it.”

In one experiment, Lee and Schwarz had people in long-term relationships complete a knowledge quiz that included expressions related to either unity or journey, then recall either conflicts or celebrations with their romantic partner, and finally evaluate their relationship. As predicted, recalling conflicts leads people to feel less satisfied with their relationship – but only with the unity frame in mind, not with the journey frame in mind. Recalling celebrations makes people satisfied with their relationship regardless of how they think about it.

In two follow-up experiments, researchers invoked the unity vs. journey frame in even subtler, more incidental ways. For example, people were asked to identify pairs of geometric shapes to form a full circle (activating unity) or draw a line that gets from point A to point B through a maze (activating journey). Such non-linguistic, merely pictorial cues were sufficient to change the way people evaluated relationships.

Again, conflicts hurt relationship satisfaction with the unity frame in mind, not with the journey frame in mind.

The study was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.