Category: Relationships

Language use changes three months before a relationship break up.

Signs that a couple is heading for a break-up are evident in their language months before the event.

The types of words both partners use change about three months before the break-up.

Their language shifts more towards a self-focus with greater use of the pronoun “I”.

There is also a higher use of words that indicate cognitive processing.

This suggests that they are thinking intensely about what is happening to their relationship.

Examples of cognitive processing words include ‘want’, ‘think’, ‘need’, ‘realise’, ‘decide’, ‘reason’, ‘depend’ and ‘wonder’.

This is true whether they are the person about to end the relationship or the one on the receiving end.

Ms Sarah Seraj, the study’s first author, said:

“It seems that even before people are aware that a breakup is going to happen, it starts to affect their lives.

We don’t really notice how many times we are using prepositions, articles or pronouns, but these function words get altered in a way when you’re going through a personal upheaval that can tell us a lot about our emotional and psychological state.”

The study analysed over 1 million posts by 6,800 people on Reddit, an online forum for discussing a wide range of subjects.

One of these forums, called r/BreakUps, is dedicated to relationship issues.

The results of the analysis revealed that language use became more personal and informal around three months before the couples broke up.

This pattern continued for a further six months afterwards.

Similar shifts in language use were seen in forums discussing divorce and other upheavals.

Ms Seraj said:

“These are signs that someone is carrying a heavy cognitive load.

They’re thinking or working through something and are becoming more self-focused.

Sometimes the use of the word ‘I’ is correlated with depression and sadness.

When people are depressed, they tend to focus on themselves and are not able to relate to others as much.”

For a minority of people, language patterns did not revert, and they returned to the r/BreakUps forum to retell the story of their break-up again and again.

This suggests that some people find it particularly hard to adjust to their new circumstances.

Dr Kate Blackburn, study co-author, said:

“What makes this project so fascinating is that for the first time, through technology, we can see the way people experience a breakup in real time.

Implications for this research are far reaching.

At the most basic level, it gives you, me, and everyday people insight into how loved ones may respond over time to the end of a romantic relationship.”

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• 10 Toxic Patterns That Sabotage Relationships (P)

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Seraj et al., 2021).

How to predict if a relationship will end in marriage.

When looking back, couples destined to marry accurately recall the ups and downs of their relationship.

Happy couples have no reason to try and hide any problems from themselves to make it feel like they are moving forward.

On the other hand, people with poor relationships have distorted memories that bear little relation to reality.

Misremembering the past may be a way of papering over the cracks in a failing relationship.

Professor Brian G. Ogolsky, the study’s first author, explained:

“People like to feel that they’re making progress as a couple.

If they’re not — if, in fact, the relationship is in trouble — they may have distorted recollections that help them feel like they’re moving forward because they need a psychological justification to stay in the relationship.”

The results come from a nine-month study involving 232 heterosexual couples who had dated for around two years.

All rated their chances of eventually getting married every month, for eight months.

Three groups of couples emerged: those whose relationships were getting worse, those who were staying the same and those who were improving.

Professor Ogolsky said that those whose relationships were improving had remarkably accurate memories:

“Couples who had deepened their commitment remembered their relationship history almost perfectly.

The graphs for this group were really interesting because the plot of the end-of-study recollection could be placed right on top of the one we had graphed from the monthly check-ins.”

Those who had maintained their relationships without really moving forward, fooled themselves slightly to get the feeling of progress, said Professor Ogolsky:

“They had given themselves some room to grow and remembered the recent past as better than they had reported it being.

If they saw maintenance as stagnation, that’s a way of addressing that cognitive gap.

It helps them feel that their relationship is developing in some way — that they’re making progress.”

Lastly, those whose relationships were on-off, or just off, were mostly in denial, Professor Ogolsky said:

“If we looked at their history as they reported it to us over the nine-month period, we could see that their chances of marriage were plummeting.

Yet their recollection was that things had been going okay.

Of course, they hadn’t seen the graph so they didn’t know their trajectory looks this dire, but it’s fair to say they were in denial about the state of their relationship.”

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The study was published in the journal Personal Relationships (Ogolsky & Surra, 2014).

How income affects whether people cheat on their partner.

People who earn less than their partner are more likely to cheat on them than those earning equal amounts.

Men may be more tempted to cheat in this situation because they feel threatened by their partner’s income.

However, men earning much more than their female partner are also more likely to cheat than those earning equal amounts.

Similarly, women were more likely to cheat when dependent on their partner — although not if they earned more.

Explaining the findings, Dr Christin Munsch, the study’s author, said:

“At one end of the spectrum, making less money than a female partner may threaten men’s gender identity by calling into question the traditional notion of men as breadwinners.

At the other end of the spectrum, men who make a lot more money than their partners may be in jobs that offer more opportunities for cheating like long work hours, travel, and higher incomes that make cheating easier to conceal.”

The conclusions come from a study of 18- to 28-year-old married and cohabiting couples; all had been together for at least a year.

The results showed that men whose income is either significantly higher or lower than their female partner are more likely to cheat on them.

Men who were most faithful generally had partners who earned around 75 percent of their own income.

In the six-month period of the study, 3.8 percent of men reported cheating on their partner, while 1.4 percent of women reported cheating.

Women who earned more than their partners, though, were actually less likely to cheat on them.

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The study was published in the journal American Sociological Review (Munsch et al., 2015).

It leads to improved relationship satisfaction and connection the very next day.

Being grateful to your partner works as an instant ‘booster shot’ for relationships, research finds.

Among couples, feeling grateful leads to improved relationship satisfaction and connection the very next day.

Little thoughtful gestures by one partner — like a back rub, a small gift or holding hands — increased feelings of gratitude.

Feeling grateful then generates a cascade of positive feelings.

The study’s lead author, Dr Sara Algoe, said:

“Feelings of gratitude and generosity are helpful in solidifying our relationships with people we care about, and benefit to the one giving as well as the one on the receiving end.”

The study tracked the day-to-day experiences of 65 couples in ongoing, committed relationships.

The results showed that the effects of gratefulness could be seen the next day, in terms of increased relationship satisfaction.

Partners responded strongly when shown their needs were being acknowledged.

Dr Algoe said:

“Gratitude triggers a cascade of responses within the person who feels it in that very moment, changing the way the person views the generous benefactor, as well as motivations toward the benefactor.

This is especially true when a person shows that they care about the partner’s needs and preferences.”

The study was published in the journal Personal Relationships (Algoe et al., 2010).

Getting married at this age is linked to the lowest divorce risk.

Getting married at 28 to 32 years old carries the lowest risk of divorce, according to statistics on marriage.

Marriage before the late twenties, or after the thirties are both linked to a higher risk of divorce later on.

The marriages most likely to end in divorce are between teenagers or those in their early twenties, or those who get married after the age of 45.

Waiting to get married until you are 25 instead of 20, for example, reduces the risk of divorce by 50 percent.

The conclusions come from an analysis of a national survey of families that included over 9,000 people.

Dr Nick Wolfinger, who conducted the analysis, writes:

“Delaying marriage from the teens until the early twenties produces the largest declines in divorce risk, for totally understandable reasons: we’re all changing a lot more from year to year as teenagers than when we’re in our twenties or thirties.

Our parents and friends are likely to disapprove of a teenage marriage, but their feelings probably won’t change much once we hit our mid-twenties.”

It makes sense that delaying marriage until later in your twenties is beneficial.

However, why does getting married in your late thirties or forties present a higher risk of divorce?

Dr Wolfinger write:

“…the kinds of people who wait till their thirties to get married may be the kinds of people who aren’t predisposed toward doing well in their marriages.

For instance, some people seem to be congenitally cantankerous.

Such people naturally have trouble with interpersonal relationships.

Consequently they delay marriage, often because they can’t find anyone willing to marry them.

When they do tie the knot, their marriages are automatically at high risk for divorce.”

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The study was published on the Institute For Family Studies website (Wolfinger, 2015).