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Determining whether your romantic relationship will last may seem like a formidable task. Who knows what obstacles might get in the way of its future? One of you could meet another person and that would be the end of it, or maybe you’ll get bored or frustrated, spelling that the end is nigh.
It might surprise you to realize that the answer is right there in front of you when you’re talking to your partner. All you have to do is pay careful attention to who says what and how the next time you have a little tiff.
The “Dance” of Complementarity
Close relationship researchers are constantly trying to zero in on the key factors that affect relationship stability. Villanova University’s Erica Slotter and colleagues (2023) had the idea that it’s not the “big things” that determine a couple’s fate, but the little, day-to-day interactions that make it possible to chart their course. Though little, these interactions can take on outsize proportions if things start to go south in the middle of a disagreement.
Based on the approach in relationship science known as “interdependence theory,” Slotter and her colleagues proposed that relationships can understood in terms of dominance and warmth, as they navigate the “dance” of complementarity. In the case of dominance, couples end up at different points along the power dimension as an interaction develops over time: “dominance begets submission, and submission begets dominance.” For warmth, complementarity takes the form that “warmth begets warmth and coldness begets coldness.”
Mapping Couple Interactions
A standard way to study couples is to put them together in the lab and watch how they resolve a disagreement. To keep things within bounds, the disagreements are usually about important but not deal-breaking conflicts. In the Slotter et al. study, 180 couples together an average of nearly 10 years (average age 33 years; range 18-73) spent 8 minutes debating a “moderately upsetting” but “not resolved” area of dispute. Raters coded the videos using a system that allowed them to judge 10-second units of communicative behavior along the dimensions of warmth and dominance.
In addition to completing the conflict task, couples also discussed how they changed in their relationship as well as what they liked best about their partner. They also completed an eye-popping 60 questionnaires tapping into such qualities as a couple’s investment in the relationship, their assessment of its quality, love, goal compatibility and attachment style (sense of security).
The findings supported the overall model with couples moving toward mismatches in dominance but matches in warmth. What’s more, the happier couples got to these positions relatively earlier in the discussion than the less well-functioning couples, “realigning their initial motivation in conflict to be closer to their partner’s… goals and concerns.”
If the image that strikes you is of a well-oiled machine, that’s what this finding seems to suggest, although the authors like the dance metaphor better: “as in life, love may indeed be ‘a dance you learn as you go.'”
Reading Your Relationship’s Dance Moves
With this idea in mind, now go back and think about the last conflict you had with your partner. How long did it take before one of you gave in to the other, but just as importantly, did any of this make you feel less affectionate toward your partner? It appears from the Villanova study that couples that navigate conflict in as stress-free a way as possible get to “yes” more quickly and with less resentment.
This is not to say that the same person has to give in every time. By “dominance,” the study authors did not mean to imply dominance of personality. They simply meant who, on this occasion, was able to sway the other person.
The signals to watch out for are those behavioral indications that you express to each other over the course of your interactions, particularly the slightly dicey ones. But these signals, as shown in the study, aren’t static. Down to the tiny intervals as short as 10 seconds each, people change in relationship to each other as an interaction unfolds. You should be able to feel, if your relationship is on track to keep getting better, that these changes result in greater momentary feelings of harmony.
To sum up, carefully noticing the small ways that you and your partner shift and adapt to each other can become the first step toward ensuring that these shifts become a source of relationship fulfillment.
