Since we are born we need to form bonds with others. No attempt to understand human behavior can be successful until we understand the intimate relationships that are at the core of the human condition..
Intimate social relationships affect three of the components of happiness: positive affect (joy), life satisfaction, and physical and mental health. Social Psychology addresses interpersonal relationships from a scientific methodology, in this way it is pursued that the knowledge acquired is reliable, valid and can be replicated by other researchers.
"Who is attracted to whom and for what reasons"
According to Reis, there are 4 important principles related to interpersonal attraction:
People tend to be attracted to people like themselves.
Regarding attitudes:
Paradigm of the false stranger: An experiment in which participants fill out an attitude questionnaire and are subsequently informed of the responses that a stranger has given to the same questionnaire. The greater the similarity of the answers, the greater the attraction expressed towards said stranger.
Law of Attraction (Byrne): There is a direct linear relationship between the level of attraction and the proportion of similar attitudes. (Although these similar attitudes may have been caused by the adaptation of one of the members of the couple to the other).
Leaving aside the field of attitudes, the relationship between attraction and similarity is not so clear since, for example, having similar physical features does not make us more attracted to a person. What does happen is that individuals with a similar level of attractiveness tend to unite, this is called the pairing hypothesis.
Regarding psychological traits, there are a number of authors who argue that we are attracted to those who have the characteristics that we would like to have (ideal self). However, there is not much evidence in favor of the principle of complementarity that holds that we are attracted to people who present traits that are complementary to ours..
The perceived similarity has a greater effect than the real one in the attraction processes, which can have negative consequences in intimate relationships when the absence of similarity is detected.
People who are close to us are likely to end up becoming our friends or partners, since the people we see frequently tend to like us better than those who are strangers, this is what is known as the mere exposure effect.
Table 7.3: Research on the effects of mere exposure on interpersonal attraction: Various experiments that illustrate that the repetition of both people and photographs increases the observer's liking in the face of a neutral initial situation.
However, several studies have shown that prolonged exposure to a stimulus, or an initial negative attitude towards the stimulus, reverses this effect, that is, attitudes towards the stimulus worsen.
We are attracted to those people we think we like. That is, we respond positively to those who like us. In addition, reciprocity has a greater effect on attraction than similarity of attitudes..
Under conditions of anxiety and stress, the desire for social contact increases, especially with people who are in the same situation.
An experiment on increasing attraction in stressful situations.
Curious experiment in which there were two groups of men, each group was going through a different bridge individually. One of the bridges was modern and safe while the other was old. Halfway through, they were approached by a researcher who explained that she was doing a study and left them the phone number so they could call her in the next few days. The members of the group that crossed the old bridge called her much more than those who crossed the new bridge. This is because they attributed their heart racing (from being on the old bridge) to feeling an attraction for the interviewer.
Here we will study what happens when a relationship based on an initial attraction turns into a couple relationship.
We will focus on the love of relationships, also called "romantic love"
Sternberg: Love has 3 relatively independent basic components: intimacy, passion and decision / commitment..
Privacy: Those components that promote proximity, bond and connection between the people involved in the relationship. (Desire to promote the well-being of the loved one, feel happy with them, have their support, etc.)
Passion: Intense desire for union with the other person. (Sexuality)
Decision / commitment: (to be together). It has a short-term component (deciding to form a couple with the other person) and a long-term component (commitment to continue the relationship).
Different types of love arise from the combination of the three components
Absence of love: There is none of the 3 components
Pleasure: There is only intimacy (friendship relations).
Infatuation: (passion without intimacy or commitment): It occurs when there is a strong attraction for the other person.
Empty love: Commitment without intimacy or passion. (marriages of convenience).
Romantic love: Combine passion and intimacy. (the love of books and movies)
Companion love: Combines intimacy and commitment (couple after many years of living together where passion has decreased but emotional bonding and the commitment to live together continue).
Foolish love: When passion leads to commitment, they are having a prior knowledge of the other person (marrying within a week of meeting).
Complete love: When the three components of love are given.
Intimacy in relationships implies a certain overlap between the self of the two members of the couple. The inclusion of others in the self is inserted within the more general framework of the model of the expansion of the self (Aron and Aron), this model maintains that the expansion of the self is a basic human motivation that can manifest itself, at least, in four different planes and satisfied by various means.
When we are in love, our self expands to include the loved one and we share their experience, hobbies, friendships, knowledge and resources.
The IOS, despite having a single item, show good indexes of reliability and correlation with other scales of intimacy in relationships.
It has been confirmed that the inclusion of the partner in the self is related to the duration and satisfaction of the relationship.
In addition to love and its components, there are other factors that influence the duration and satisfaction of romantic relationships. It's all about attachment styles.
Bowlby formulated attachment theory to explain the different types of bonds that a child can establish with their caregivers.
Secure attachment: They show concern when their mother leaves the room where the experiment is carried out but they recover quickly.
Avoidant attachment: They show little concern when their mother leaves and tend to avoid her when she returns.
Anxious attachment: They show extreme concern at the mother's apparent abandonment and exhibit conflictive behaviors upon her return, for example, clinging to her and rejecting her later.
And the different types of attachment from childhood can carry over into adulthood, specifically to the realm of couple relationships:
Secure attachment: Ability of the person to establish intimate relationships and feel comfortable having a certain dependence on the partner, or letting the partner depend on it.
Avoidant attachment: Discomfort when relationships are too close and distrust of other people, which would lead to avoid depending on them and to show a certain coldness or inability to express feelings.
Anxious attachment: Constantly demanding greater intimacy and attention from your partner and would show excessive concern about possible abandonment.
Table 7.6: Characteristics of attachment styles across studies
Anxious attachment style
- Negative relationship with self-esteem and self-efficacy.
- Sensitive to grievances, slights and threats, and react disproportionately to events.
- Are attracted to other anxious people.
Avoidant attachment style
- No relationship is found between this style and self-esteem.
- Negative relationships with self-efficacy.
- They tend to deny their weaknesses, suppressing negative emotions and memories. - Less tendency to show your feelings and emotions.
- Attracted to other avoidant people.
Common features of both styles
- Negative relationship with relationship satisfaction.
- They describe their partner and friends in negative terms.
- Contrary to what happens with these styles, the security in the attachment facilitates the formation, consolidation and maintenance of lasting and satisfactory relationships..
There are 3 great approaches when it comes to dealing with dissolution in relationships:
a) The sociological approach: What sociodemographic variables can predict the breakdown of relationships (religion, age, length of engagement, etc.)
b) Clinical approach: The interest is focused on the design of therapeutic interventions that allow improving couple relationships.
c) Psychosocial approach: (the one in this chapter): Search and empirically contrast theories that allow explaining the creation, maintenance and dissolution of relationships.
Among these approaches there is an agreement about the main causes that contribute to the deterioration of the relationship. Two of the most important are: communication problems and jealousy.
What deteriorates a couple is not the appearance of a conflict (a normal thing in any interaction) but the way in which couples manage the conflict.
When couples get along, they exhibit behaviors that seek to reduce conflict. For their part, in troubled couples there is an escalation of conflict through what Gottman calls:
The 4 Horsemen of the Marriage Apocalypse: Criticism, Disdain, Being on the Defensive, and Alienation.
There are also gender differences in marital behavior:
They: Cope with conflicts to a greater extent, are more emotionally expressive and their moods are more extreme than those of men.
They: Are less emotionally expressive and resort more than women to defensive and withdrawal behaviors in the face of conflict.
The term jealousy refers to an emotion that arises from the real or imagined suspicion of threat to a relationship that we consider valuable. Two approaches explain this phenomenon:
Evolutionary approach: Jealousy is an adaptive mechanism whose objective is to guarantee the reproduction and propagation of genes.
For men, the main threat is that their partner has children from another man, that is, the most threatening infidelity is sexual..
For women, the most threatening thing is that their partner becomes emotionally involved in a relationship since it can jeopardize the resources necessary for the survival of their offspring. Therefore, in women jealousy will be produced to a greater extent before an emotional infidelity.
Cultural approach: The perception of threat is different in men and women due to the fact that in the socialization process they acquire different beliefs about the type of infidelity that will involve the other type to a greater extent..
Men believe that if a woman has sexual relations with another person it is because she is emotionally linked to her, but not vice versa. Therefore, sexual infidelity is what causes jealousy.
Women: believe that if a man is unfaithful emotionally, he will also be unfaithful sexually but not vice versa, which is why they perceive emotional infidelity as more stressful.
Although the two perspectives seem contrary, in reality it is the same.
Another aspect investigated in relation to jealousy is the characteristics of the rival. From this perspective, the jealousy reaction is generated when, through social comparison, those areas that are relevant to people's self-concept are questioned in front of a rival. This is explained in the following table.
Table 7.9: An investigation on jealousy: Study with men and women in which they responded to a hypothetical infidelity (sexual or emotional) of their partner with a supposed rival. Two variables related to the characteristics of the rival were manipulated:
Regarding the process of social comparison, it was found that an unvalued rival, in those fields of self-definition of each sex, arouses a greater feeling of inferiority. An affair with an undesirable person is a further insult and a threat to self-esteem.
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