Your Negativity Can Break Up Your Relationship

How positive are you in your relationship? Maybe you just fell in love, maybe you’re into your first month or first year, maybe you’re at the teetering end of what you thought was a great relationship. Whatever stage you’re in, how negative or positive you are will determine the make-it or break-it of your relationship.

Most research on successful relationships are flawed because they require couples to answer questions on how they feel about each other. These types of research are highly biased as couples would most likely not tell the truth.

Hence researcher Dr. Ronald Rogge, an associate professor at the University of Rochester and co-author of a study recently published online in the journal Psychological Science developed a simple technique to bypass the bias behavior to really get into what people really think about their partners.

This is done through simple word association games. Three types of words are presented from three different categories: good words association (vacation, movie); bad words (death, criticizing) and partner-related words (names or traits)

The researchers asked 222 volunteers who were involved in romantic relationships to choose good words or partner words from a list of words. In another exercise, participants were instructed to choose what they see as a bad word or partner word. “If the participants were really good at this, it would suggest at the back of their minds that they had a negative attitude toward the partner,” Rogge said.

Researchers then followed-up with the participants one year later and realized that those who associated bad words to partners were more likely to be separated within one year. Those who did well in the partner-bad tests and poorly in the partner-good tests had a 75% risk of break-up.

This research taps into the subconscious minds of the partners and digs up feelings they would not normally admit to another person.

Dr. Eli Finkel, an associate professor of social psychology at Northwestern University, who has researched relationships says that the findings illustrate “the power of the unconscious to influence relationship outcomes,”
Negativity although seemingly harmless and not directly directed to your partner can still create a gap and plant a seed in your subconscious. Consciously thinking positive thoughts is a good way of curbing the growth of negativity in the relationship.

Go on and try it. Ask your partner certain words in respect to your relationship and see if they feel good of bad towards those words such as:

• Clean
• Share
• Candlelight
• Save
• Bank account
• Moody
• Boastful
• Soccer
• Reading
• Wine…etc.