Relationships

Most advice for a relationship that has gone a little flat converges on the same prescription: do something new together. Book the surprise weekend, take the pottery class, find a restaurant neither of you has tried. The promise is that novelty will do for an established couple what it did at the start, reviving some of the charge that familiarity has worn down. This one is not just magazine filler; it has a research pedigree. It descends from Art Aron’s self-expansion model, which holds that we are drawn to relationships that enlarge us, and that a partnership feels most alive when it keeps adding to who we are. The model’s most cited support is a 2000 study by Aron and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which couples randomly assigned to a novel, mildly arousing task – crawling across a gym mat while joined at the wrist and ankle – reported higher relationship quality afterward than couples given a mundane one. Even the pop-culture version, the shaky-bridge lore about misattribution of arousal, comes out of the same tradition. ...

Compatibility talk usually assumes a matching problem. Whether the folk theory is “opposites attract” or its more evidence-backed rival, “birds of a feather” – what researchers call assortative mating – the underlying picture is the same: there is some alignment between two people’s traits, and relationship quality depends on getting the alignment right. Dating profiles, matchmaking algorithms, and most advice about “finding your person” all inherit this assumption. A 2026 study in the Journal of Research in Personality by Marta Kowal at the University of Wrocław suggests the picture is more interesting than either folk theory. Kowal analyzed survey data from 41,606 partnered adults across 74 countries – a deliberate corrective to a literature built mostly on Western, educated samples. Participants rated themselves and their partners on nine traits, including kindness, physical attractiveness, health, religiousness, resources, education, and political orientation, and completed a short form of Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale along with a relationship satisfaction measure. The analysis compared what happens when partners are rated as evenly matched on a trait against what happens when one is rated higher than the other. ...

Most relationship advice has a repair bias. The skills we’re told to invest in – listening when a partner is upset, de-escalating a fight, repairing after a rupture – are almost all about handling the bad moments well. The implicit model is that a relationship’s health is decided at its low points, and that maintenance is essentially a form of damage control. Get good at the hard conversations and the rest takes care of itself. ...

There’s a comfortable assumption baked into most relationship advice: if you’re a supportive partner – the kind who listens, takes on a chore when your partner is overwhelmed, asks how the meeting went – then your relationship will be better off for it. Support is treated as the input, and satisfaction as the output, with the work happening somewhere in between. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology by Michelle Roth and colleagues at the University of Zurich and Florida State suggests this picture is missing a step. When the researchers looked at 163 long-term couples (mean relationship length: about 30 years), they found that the direct link between providing support and feeling satisfied was surprisingly weak. Most of the work was being done by something happening in between: the helper perceiving that their partner was grateful for the help. ...

Ask someone what a great relationship is built on and you’ll likely hear some version of the same answer: find the right person. Someone you’re wildly attracted to, someone who makes you feel alive, someone with whom the spark never fades. The implicit model is that love is something you fall into — and if it doesn’t last, it’s because you fell into it with the wrong person. Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh, a social psychologist and relationship therapist who has spent over two decades working with couples across more than forty countries, calls this the submergent model of love. And her research suggests it’s one of the most reliable ways to end up disappointed. ...

Ask someone what makes a relationship work and you’ll typically hear some version of the same answer: find the right person. Someone kind, emotionally intelligent, financially stable, with compatible values and a good sense of humor. The implicit assumption is that relationship quality is largely a function of who your partner is – their traits, their personality, their baggage. A landmark 2020 study by Samantha Joel, Paul Eastwick, and 84 collaborators1 puts a large dent in that assumption. ...

Validation refers to the process of communicating to another person that their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are important and they matter. Validation doesn’t mean agreeing or approving. In fact, it conveys that a relationship is important and solid – even when two parties disagree. Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT) identifies six methods of validation that a practitioner can employ with a client, ranging from validation level (VL) 1 through 6, increasing sequentially in difficulty. Although initially developed to treat patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD), these validation strategies are useful in any interpersonal context. ...

While there are many couples therapy approaches in use, only a few have been subjected to repeated empirical testing. Two particularly promising treatments are Behavioral Couples Therapy (BCT) and Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT). BCT originates from operant learning theory and the observation that distressed couples tend to punish each other for relationship-harming behaviors more than they reward each other for relationship-enhancing behaviors. The two main components of BCT are behavioral exchange training and communication and problem-solving skills. Behavioral exchange training involves each partner learning which of their behaviors reinforce their partner, and agreeing to mutually engage in those behaviors. Techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have also been incorporated into BCT (with the resulting treatment termed Cognitive Behavioral Couples Therapy), since evidence indicates that distressed couples show thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that exacerbate dysfunctional patterns. ...

Dr. Alexandra Solomon, professor of Northwestern University’s popular “Marriage 101” class and author of Loving Bravely, posits that the most important trait of a partner is relational self-awareness. People with this quality can talk about how past relationships shaped them, identify their feelings instead of merely acting on them, view relationship issues as a combination of “me” and “you” stuff, and listen to feedback in a healthy way. You can assess this in a date by looking at (1) their stimulus-response process in frustrating moments (do they fight, flee, freeze, or study the moment and respond in a composed way?), and (2) how they talk about past relationships — do they see events in black and white, or are they aware of the nuances of context? Is there blame and/or shame? Do they play the victim or do they take shared responsibility? Do they cast other people as villains, losers, or fools? Is there a focus on growth? The canonical financial disclaimer that “past performance may not be an indicator of future results” does hold – but how we process our past may be one of the most telling indicators of how we will function in current or future relationships.

Many of us are familiar with the political horse trading that’s part and parcel of the modern romantic relationship. We do Thankgiving with your parents, and Christmas with mine. I take the dog to the groomers, you mow the lawn this week. This kind of trading is an example of an exchange norm in a relationship. In academic papers, an exchange norm is typically contrasted with a communal norm. The exchange norm, while sometimes very convenient, may not be optimal. Indeed, much of the book 80/80 Marriage by Nate and Kaley Klemp deals with how to move away from the idea of fairness (a key requirement for a successful exchange) to a relationship defined by radical generosity and a spirit of shared success. One argument they make that it’s often impossible to draw an equivalence relationship between the things being traded – how many kitchen countertop wipe-downs are equal to one trip to the dog groomer? The subjectivity inherent in the valuations rendered by each side makes this kind of exercise fraught. ...