STUDY: Couples who think of love as a journey are happier than those who think of it as being “soulmates”

“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies,” Aristotle said. Poetic as it sounds, believing that you and your partner are a perfect match can actually harm your relationship according to a new study.

Psychologists noted that people think and talk about love in seemingly limitless ways. However, there are two most common attitudes that surround how we think about relationships. One considers love as perfect union or being “made for each other.” The other thinks of love as a journey (“we’ve been through all these things together,” “look how far we’ve come”).

According to social psychologists Spike W.S. Lee of the University of Toronto and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Southern California, these two beliefs about relationships are very interesting because they have the tendency to focus or downplay the harmful effects of conflicts on the relationship. The reason for this is the thought that if two people are truly made for each other, why should they have any disagreements?

“Our findings corroborate prior research showing that people who implicitly think of relationships as perfect unity between soulmates have worse relationships than people who implicitly think of relationships as a journey of growing and working things out.”

According to Lee, their discoveries support prior research that thinking that a relationship grows with experiences is better in the long run. Different ways of thinking and talking about love relationships lead to different ways of assessing it.

One experiment by Lee and Schwarz showed that remembering conflicts leads people to be less content with their relationships with the unity frame in mind. On the other hand, remembering celebrations make people happy and fulfilled with their relationship no matter what attitude they have about love.

Lee and Schwartz conducted two follow-up experiments. The participants were asked to identify pairs of geometric shapes to form a full circle (activating unity) or draw a line that gets from point A to point B through a maze (activating journey).  These visual cues were sufficient to change the way people evaluated relationships. And once more, they concluded that disagreements don’t hurt relationships with the journey frame in mind, but not so with the unity frame in mind.

On a final note, Lee and Schwarz advised that couples should think of their relationship as a journey with many challenges along the way and not one that is thought of as a unity of souls or a match made in heaven.

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry