Romantic relationships — the stuff inside

by | Jun 18, 2010 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Boys are made of frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails. What are romantic relationships made of?

With colleagues in Australia and the U.S., I have found evidence of the fundamental characteristics of romantic relationships. Hundreds of individuals each gave us eight words that describe their current romantic relationship. We boiled these words down to those 79 terms mentioned by more than a few individuals. We then recruited hundreds of other individuals to rate their current relationship on the words and to rate their relationship satisfaction. We used factor analysis to identify characteristics that tended to receive similar ratings. We found four factors that we now include in our four-factor model of romantic relationships. These are how secure the relationship is, how exciting, how caring, and how difficult. All four characteristics were associated with relationship satisfaction. Of the four characteristics, Secure and Exciting were most closely associated with relationship satisfaction. Married participants rated their relationship more secure than other individuals, and dating participants rated their relationship more exciting than other individuals. Those findings lead to a good question: How can a couple make a relationship both exciting and secure? Another question: How would you rate your current (or most recent) romantic relationship on characteristics Secure, Exciting, Caring, and Difficult? One final question: What could you (and your partner) do to make a relationship characteristic more the way you would like?

John Malouff, PhD, JD

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