338 - The Science of Relationship Maintenance
Relationship maintenance
The term “relationship maintenance” means activities and behaviors people use to preserve their romantic relationship.
A large study done on relationship maintenance divides it into two broad categories: threat mitigation and relationship enhancement, and discusses how both these purposes occur within individual or interactive modes.
Individual behaviors are internal processing and reflection one does on one’s own.
Interactive behaviors are external processing, reflecting, discussing, or acting that happens with a partner as opposed to on one’s own.
Maintenance strategies
The four relationship maintenance strategies we’re covering from this study are: individual threat mitigation, interactive threat mitigation, individual relationship enhancement, and interactive relationship enhancement.
Individual threat mitigation
Derogation of alternatives, such as minimizing attractiveness of others.
Idealization of partners.
Attributions, or assigning positive explanations to a partner’s behavior and then acting accordingly.
Takeaway: Think good thoughts about your partner and give them the benefit of the doubt.
Interactive threat mitigation
Conflict management.
Forgiveness.
Sacrifice (positive and negative types).
Facilitative behavior.
Dyadic coping.
Takeaway: Be a team when dealing with internal conflict or external stress.
Individual relationship enhancement strategies
Relationship thinking.
Generosity.
Gratitude.
Partner-focused prayer.
Takeaway: Give kindness, gratitude, and powerful magicks to your partner.
Interactive relationship enhancement maintenance strategies
Communicative relationship maintenance strategies.
Relationship talk about the state of the relationship.
Social support and responsiveness to partner’s concerns, needs, desires, etc.
Humor.
Joint leisure activities.
Takeaway: Check in with your partner and have fun.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast we're putting on our overalls, grabbing our spanners and socket wrenches, and sliding up under this relationship to do some work on it. That's right. We're talking about relationship maintenance today. What can we do to ensure that our relationships are as positive and fulfilling as possible for everyone involved? What kinds of maintenance are the most beneficial? We're discussing all of this and more on today's episode.
Dedeker: That was surprisingly sexy, that caught me off guard.
Jase: Oh, gosh, that's not the reaction I expected.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: I expected mockery for my silly metaphor.
Dedeker: Maybe just because it was you.
Emily: Oh, that's sweet. No, I was mocking you. I was putting on my overalls and sliding under the relationship. That was fun. I appreciate it does.
Dedeker: Getting all greasy got those calluses on your hands. Good old-fashioned relationship maintenance, baby.
Emily: Whoo!
Jase: Oh, yes.
Dedeker: Speaking of, what do you think about that term? What comes to mind?
Jase: Radar?
Emily: That's our big catch-all for--
Dedeker: That's our thing. That's the only thing we got. A big catch-all for relationship maintenance, your RADAR. What else comes to mind?
Jase: What comes to mind to me is the idea of, especially if you have multiple partners of being sure you're putting in some effort into all of them and not just letting one of them fall to the wayside when you're not with that person or something, especially if it's long-distanced, that comes to mind too.
Emily: I think that so many of us get into a relationship with a person and expects that they're just going to stay that way for the majority of the relationship or for the rest of the time the two of you are together and it's important to see and figure out and also ask about ways in which maybe they've updated themselves and their lives and their goals and ambitions. I think that should be a part of regularly scheduled relationship maintenance too.
Dedeker: Wow. The two of you have some very thoughtful, healthy-sounding associations.
Emily: We better after doing this podcast--
Dedeker: I guess that's yes, there's a little bit of some bias there, but when I was pulling this episode together and I was first thinking about this topic, a lot of stuff came to mind for me. First of all, maintenance sex came to mind for me, which we're going to be talking about a little bit later, actually probably in our bonus, thinking about high maintenance versus a low maintenance relationship, high maintenance versus low maintenance people, which I thought was interesting.
I did specifically choose not to go down that particular rabbit hole because I do think that high maintenance, low maintenance people slash relationships, it tends to be a little gendered of who we think are high maintenance people versus low maintenance people. I just really couldn't find anything actually helpful there. I just came to the conclusion, I think maybe this is just not a helpful concept.
Jase: I think it also tends to be associated with associating value with being high or low maintenance and maybe isn't as useful a way to actually talk about real human beings in relationships.
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. The main inspiration for this episode was a journal article that I came across sometime last year. I was out there trying to figure out have there been any studies on any relationship maintenance process, check-in similar to a RADAR? That was what it was. I was trying to find has there been any research on anything vaguely RADAR ask? I stumbled on this 2017 review study that was published in the Journal of Family Theory and Review and its titled, Relationship Maintenance: A review of research on romantic relationships.
This article is like it says on the tin, it's a review of the existing literature and studies that have been done on relationship maintenance behaviors, at least everything that existed up until 2017. These researchers cold information from 1,149 different published studies on relationship--
Emily: It's amazing
Dedeker: Yes. Good God, there's a lot of information. That's why it's going to make the main basis of our episode today. Basically the authors did the Multiamory job for us, which is looking at all the different resources and studies and evidence, and then organizing it and pulling it together and making it into a nice little cohesive framework or cohesive package, good job, Okolsky et al. All of your supporting researchers who pulled all this together because there's some really fascinating information here.
Emily: Yes. That's a ton of information my goodness. Well, to start us off, let's talk about some basic definitions. Researchers use the term relationship maintenance to refer to activities and behaviors that people use to preserve their romantic relationships that is fairly self-explanatory. There are many different theories as to why people even want to preserve their relationship at all.
That's interesting to me because when you say preserve going back to what I was saying before, are you preserving the idea of the relationship that you once had or are you cultivating and manifesting the relationship that you want to have and that you do have.
Dedeker: Well, we will get to that. We will answer your question.
Emily: How excited are you?
Dedeker: Will answer your question anon, Emily.
Emily: Alrighty. Well, let's talk about those different theories that people have on why they want to have any relationship maintenance at all. There's the initial evolutionary psychology theory explanation about things like mate retention. Again, as I said, preserve the mate that you have and continue to procreate with them, perhaps something along those lines. Resource acquisition, things like keeping the resources that you have and maintaining them and keeping a household for example and that might be easier to do if you have a mate.
Dedeker: Yes. Basically, that's the gist of the idea of like, "Oh, if we have behaviors that encourage us to maintain an ongoing connection with another human being, that means that increases our likelihood that we're going to be able to acquire and hold on to resources-
Emily: Keep stuff.
Dedeker: -Keep our stuff, usually our food at the very least. That means if we have food then we're more likely to survive, therefore it's in our best interests to--"
Jase: Have more babies and for those babies to survive and all. It's all that whole thing.
Dedeker: Have more babies and all that stuff you know that whole evolutionary psychology.
Emily: Exactly. Something we talked about a lot on many different episodes of this podcast is attachment theory explanation or just attachment theory in general. We form these impressions and these bonds and these needs as a young person with our parents. That really extends into our adult relationships and how we view the world and how we view relationships in general and then how we are either attached or not attached to people, things like that.
There is also a maintenance of moving into a more secure attachment away from those dismissive or anxious attachment, things like that into a more secure lasting relationship with your partner. We have our theories. The Multiamory theories is what Dedeker called it. Human beings, we like staying connected to other human beings and we like having healthy relationships because it produces goodness and joy and happiness and all of those things are really important to maintaining a healthy relationship, and who doesn't want that. I want that.
Dedeker: It hasn't been extensively and empirically studied, but it's just more of the-- Don't worry about it so much.
Emily: That's what you think. No, you're probably right.
Jase: It is a little bit of that. Isn't it okay for us just to want this thing, because we want to have healthy, good relationships and be good to people and be good to ourselves. Do we need to make it about resource hoarding to have more children or the fact that we are scared of being abandoned by our parents or something. Maybe all those are true?
Maybe they have parts to them that are true but at the end of the day, I think all of us get, if you want to maintain a relationship, you get that you just do. You just want to maintain that and you want it to be good. You want it to be a quality relationship. Some scholars theorize that relationship maintenance behaviors are for the purpose of keeping it in one particular state, like you were talking about Emily of maybe your partner not changing, or at least the configuration of the relationship, not changing, something like that. Then others think that these relationship maintenance behaviors are for the purpose of keeping a relationship progressing and growing in a satisfactory direction. The authors of this particular meta-analysis of all these studies are like, "Por que no los dos? Why can't we have both?" They divide the purpose of relationship maintenance into two broad categories, but rather than being those two categories, they put them into categories of one, threat mitigation, and two relationship enhancement.
Dedeker: Let's just talk about the impressions that that terminology leaves on us without going into what it actually means.
Emily: Keeping away from threats and possible bad things in your relationship and then making your relationship better.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Yes.
Emily: Or do you mean threats from the outside, like other people?
Jase: That's the question, isn't it?
Dedeker: That is the question. That's what comes to mind for me, as soon as I hear threat mitigation in the context of talking about relationships. The first thing I'm thinking of is pretty classic, like toxic monogamy culture. I need to-
Emily: Slash maybe evo psych.
Dedeker: -preserve the relationship. Maybe some evo psych stuff. I just need to make sure that there's no interlopers who could possibly think about stealing my mate.
Jase: Relationship enhancements. There's probably pills for that or something.
Dedeker: Like male enhancements.
Jase: Let's talk about what they really are, though.
Dedeker: Threat mitigation, they connect more to that purpose of trying to keep the relationship in a particular state of safety and security and then they tie relationship enhancement to that purpose of wanting the relationship to feel better, to get better, to progress, and to grow as well. I don't want to say subdivide into other categories because it's more like these things form a almost if you imagine like an X, Y axis and four quadrants. That's more the way that I'm thinking about dividing these. It's like on the one side you have threat mitigation behaviors and relationship enhancement behaviors. Then on the other access, you have individual behaviors and interactive behaviors.
As in individual behaviors are stuff that you do internally, your internal processing, you're internal reflecting and thinking that you do on your own about the relationship and then there's interactive behaviors and that's all the stuff that happens externally. The external processing you do with your partner, the reflecting and discussing that the two of you do together or the actions that you take with your partner. These four factors combine and interact with each other. This is the framework that these particular authors came up with for understanding this huge wealth of information about all the different relationship maintenance behaviors and strategies that have been observed in human beings.
Jase: We're going to go through these four different quadrants, as Dedeker said of relationship maintenance strategies, which is individual threat mitigation and then interactive threat mitigation and then individual relationship enhancement and then interactive relationship enhancement. Dedeker wrote this, I'm going to read it because it sounds great. Don't trip chocolate chip. We're going to be summarizing these into nice, easy, pithy, tweetable takeaways so don't even stress.
Emily: Tweetable?
Dedeker: Yes. Just can be a lot of information. That's very exciting to me when I found this study last year I was just like, ohhh...you know, just drooling over all the information here, but I want to encourage people listening. Don't get super hung up on it. I think this is a lot of good ideas and really good actual stuff to apply to your relationship. We're also going to be trying to just sum up some essential principles or essential tenets that will be important takeaways, as far as the stuff that you can do that can actually really help maintain your relationship over time.
With that said, the first category we're going to look at is individual behaviors that have to do with threat mitigation, those maintenance behaviors. I'm going to start out with a little bit of a doozy and a little bit of a controversial one because what they found and again reminding people that this is individual so it's internal. This is the internal threat mitigation that you're doing can include something like what's known as a derogation of alternatives or minimizing how attractive other people are other than your partner. As in you have this narrative in your head that like your partner is the most attractive or the most fit for you and other people are not as attractive.
Now of course, as soon as we say that, everybody in the audience who's non-monogamous is like, "What are you talking about? That's not the point. The whole point of this is that we find other people attractive and I'm going to address that in just a second. Basically, studies have found that you can force this. You can force yourself to think other people are off-limits and no good and only my partner is the one for me, and that can actually backfire and create this forbidden fruit attraction which I think makes a lot of sense.
It's why people find affairs to be very sexy and thrilling and exciting because it does create that sense of this thing that I've told myself that I can't have and that I shouldn't have because it's inferior, but I'm going to have it anyway because we also associate guilt and pleasure. We've talked about that on this podcast before as well, but they found that if people were not necessarily forcing it, downplaying the attractiveness of others, was associated with feeling higher levels of commitment, love, a stronger relationship identity, and a more secure attachment. Yes, of course, all of us non-monogamous folks are like, "What is that about? Is this toxic monogamy culture, that bias, seeping into studies or is there something else here?" I do have a take on this because-
Jase: Give us your hot take.
Dedeker: -I personally-- My hot take? I don't disagree with this because I think that there can be a distinction between, I find people other than my partner attractive and the feeling of, I find people other than my partner attractive to the point that I'm ready to dump my partner for someone else. To the point where I'm negatively comparing my partner to other people and that means that now I have a bias for only saying negative stuff that my partner does, and therefore I'm constantly fantasizing about how much better somebody else could be. That takes me out of the relationship. That's the way that I square it for myself.
Jase: I could also see this being related to the, I think maybe the thing that comes from the toxic monogamy culture or like the serial monogamy culture is this idea of I'm looking around, not just to, do I find this person, this other person interesting or attractive, but would this person be attainable and would they be a trade up from what I have? I think that's where the toxic part of monogamy culture comes.
I could see this idea of, I guess, at least getting out of that mindset of rather than constantly trying to compare of like, "Would they be an upgrade from what I have that that whether you're monogamous or non-monogamous would be good to move away from that way of transactionally looking at your partners," I guess.
Dedeker: I think that's the thing. I think that this actually still applies even if you're non-monogamous, it's just in a slightly different way. For me, I think it's getting away from, again, like that phone upgrade mentality to getting away from that upgrade of--
Emily: Your partner is the next iPhone.
Dedeker: The next iPhone, but I think toxic serial monogamy culture really encourages people to think that way.
Emily: Oh sure.
Jase: The one over here has a better camera and also better battery life.
Dedeker: Security I've heard as well in this latest episode.
Emily: When we see celebrities and say like, "Oh, wow. Ben Affleck is really dating up because he is with Jennifer Lopez right now," or something along those lines.
Jase: The terminology is very much...
Emily: Oh, yes, it's very in our culture. Absolutely.
Dedeker: I do think that you can feel attract- obviously if you're non-monogamous you feel attraction to other people other than your partner, emotional, romantic, sexual attraction. I do think that if you're in that mentality of, "I could find someone better than what I have currently now," then that could be a problem. I think minimizing that thinking probably helps with relationship maintenance though that's my hot take on it.
Emily: Now let's move on to the total flip side of this in a way, which is the idealization of partners, which I feel like happens so much early on in a related and maybe it can be with those maintenance moments, but especially, I think even in non-monogamy NRE makes us in so many ways idealize our new partner and like put them on this pedestal and freak out just because they exist. "Oh my God, they're the best thing I've ever seen in my life." Yes, there's this positive exaggeration of your partner's qualities. You're looking at everything through rose-tinted glasses or a positive exaggeration of your perception of the relationship as well as your future with this partner. My God have I done this so many times like, "I'm going to marry this person," two seconds after meeting them or whatever. Like, "Oh, this guy's the one," or whatever. I did that all the time when I was in high school and college and it's silly.
Even when I was non-monogamous I think that I idealized what the future would hold for these people that came into my life.
Dedeker: I think that what the researcher is finding is if you can do that, or hang on to some of that even that NRE is no longer there, that is going to help with maintaining the relationship over time.
Emily: That makes sense, even if, I don't know. There's a potential rigidity in that that I find to be a maybe a little scary, like a lack of going with the flow whatever the relationship takes you. I guess it can also, especially in, I don't know, in some relationships that's an exciting and good thing to do and idealizing everything that you're having with that person.
Jase: I think what it brings up for me at least looking at what the research is talking about here that they're not talking as much about I guess just the future of what you think is going to come and not be inflexible about that but more having an optimistic view of that, and then also having like this slightly biased towards thinking 'they're greater than they are' attitude towards your partner.
The thing that this brings up for me though because it also brought up some feelings of caution to me is just worrying about getting into that territory of relationship advice that completely ignores the idea that maybe this relationship isn't a good one, or maybe your partner isn't good for you, and instead, I'm just going to be like, "I'm failing if I am not somehow blindly seeing past all of their faults."
I don't think that's what the research is saying you should do but I do feel when taken without that caveat, it can get into that territory.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. Of course, on the show, we're always encouraging people to pay attention to red flags and to do whatever you need to do to have a reality check especially if you're an NRE and it's okay to break up. I think for me this is really helpful to know because I think about this on the opposite side which is I think that I'm someone who's predisposed to think about things very negatively and to notice faults and imperfections because that’s who I am.
I think about this on the opposite side of even in a good relationship if you're predisposed to be paying attention to negative things, that's not going to be helpful for maintaining a relationship in the long run and so I do think that there is something to be said about almost training yourself to have that bias towards your partner of noticing their positive qualities, their positive attributes, the positive things that they do.
Emily: It feels like what you're saying is that there needs to be a middle ground between what I am predisposed to do and what you're predisposed to do, and perhaps that's the ideal thing. There's an optimal level of idealization, and when you have too much or too little it just creates negative effects all around.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes, of course.
Emily: As we talk about a lot of this show this idea of assuming positive intent with your partner that's something that I've had to get good at over the last three years instead of just thinking like, "Oh, whatever they said was triggering, and they mean when in malfeasance or something towards me and said you're assuming that they are coming to you with love and with the best of intentions even if it's challenging for you in the moment." The Gottmans called this positive sentiment override. I love that, that's cool.
Dedeker: Yes. It is that. It's basically this idea that my positive sentiments about my partner are more likely to override my negative sentiments.
Emily: No.
Dedeker: Again, that doesn't mean that they could commit murder and I don't care, or they could just totally abuse me and I don't care. It's more about these day-to-day conflicts or day-to-day annoyances that I can essentially give myself a little bit more of that bias to give my partner the awe or give them the benefit of the doubt, or maybe attribute, a more positive intent to their actions or to their words.
Emily: Yes, that's lovely. The big takeaway here with this whole what is this? This is individual threat mitigation maintenance strategy is that’s about to fall. The takeaway with that is-
Jase: Everyone get out your phones, this is the tweet of all.
Emily: There, there it is. It’s clearer.
Jase: This is-
Emily: Hashtag.
No, not hashtag. This is the tweet. "Think good thoughts about your partner, give them the benefit of the doubt."
Dedeker: Just the most version of it.
Jase: I checked and that's only 75 characters including punctuating.
Emily: So you’re right? No problem.
Dedeker: I’m fine.
Emily: Hashtag.
Jase: You can either put a ton of hashtags in after that, or you could clarify it a little bit if you think that they deserve it and if not, get out of the relationship.
Dedeker: Oh my God.
Jase: No, I mean seriously.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: It’s like that who like give them the benefit of the doubt but not if they keep being shitty and this is actually a bad situation, in which case just GTFO. Please.
Emily: Got it.
Jase: There's probably room for that in 20%.
Dedeker: Maybe I should have started out with a blanket caveat is that I'm not encouraging anyone to be employing relationship maintenance strategies to a shitty relationship or an abusive relationship. I think that's the general caveat with all of Multiamory. With all of these that we're going through, I'm assuming that this is a relationship that you want to stay in and is good for you.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Right, yes. That’s an important part. If you or your partner don't want to do this because you don't want the relationship to work, then just get out now instead of trying these techniques. Okay, great. That was your tweet, "Think good thoughts about your partner, give them the benefit of the doubt." Okay, section two, quadrant two. These is interactive threat mitigation maintenance strategies. This is when you're working together to mitigate threats to the relationship.
Emily: Not just internal but external.
Jase: Everyone listening at-- That's the question. Everyone at home is kind of squinting their eyes right now being like, "Where are you going with this?" The first category within this quadrant is conflict management. There's a lot of different strategies that go into conflict management, we won't go into all of these in detail right now but Multiamory Episode 210 about, Take the Fight Out of Your Fights and Multiamory 275 on Demon Dance Battles. I would say also the episode on Repair Shop would be another good one that could go in this category.
Basically, the authors of the study highlight the various types of accommodation or how to respond constructively rather than destructively in moments of conflict or disagreement. For example, voice is one of them. Basically, what do you say? What do you say, and how do you say it? Are you doing it in a way that’s centering relationship improvement rather than tearing the other person down or tearing down the connection and attempts that repair the repair shop through communication that way?
Another category of this is loyalty which they described as waiting and hoped for the relationship to change. Essentially, I would say maybe another way to talk about that would just be being willing to stick through the process while it's improving rather than, this sounds very passive to just say wait and hope that it changes but more like being willing to wait and be part of that process.
Those two contrast with exit and neglect which are both more destructive ways of approaching that with exit being the withdrawing, disengaging, maybe stonewalling, or even just leaving whenever things get difficult, or neglect which would be just not giving a shit about the relationship. Not doing anything to keep your side of the street clean as it were.
Dedeker: Yes. All this stuff under conflict management again, it's the stuff that we do together to help maintain the relationship which involves I think very much the spirit of the show which is like training conflict is there something that's productive and constructive rather than just destructive. Related to that, another strategy that they found was forgiveness.
As in both partners working together to forgo condemning each other or getting revenge on each other even in situations where it feels like that response is justified. Such a situation where someone's broken trust or some kind of harm has been done. They also found that self-forgiveness as well within a relationship influences both the relationship satisfaction of the person who was hurt and also the person who did the hurting.
Now, this is a really tricky topic because I think that in our cultural guys right now there’s not a lot of value placed on forgiveness. In general, I think we have a lot of negative associations with, "Oh, forgiveness means giving someone a pass, it means we're not holding someone accountable." I think in this case, in a relationship that is good for you and that you want to continue this is like the opposite of holding a grudge.
It's the opposite of just telling up all the things that your partner has done wrong and holding on to those for the rest of your lives. Forgiveness, however, that means to you, hopefully, it doesn't mean necessarily just like giving somebody a pass, it seems like this is actually a really important strategy for maintaining your relationship over time.
Jase: Yes. We should maybe do a whole episode on that kind of idea at some point.
Emily: Forgiveness?
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: We should. I did look in our back catalog and we
Dedeker: touched on it when you did your most recent apology, you're giving and receiving apologies episode, but we touched on forgiveness but we haven't done an entire episode. I think go ahead and put that on our list.
Jase: I think something about the difference between holding someone accountable and not forgiving them, that you can forgive someone and also hold them accountable at the same time would be a really good thing to talk about. That'd be a good one for this but, yes, absolutely. It's like, this is where you can get into that situation where you just continually resent someone for something in the past, you resent your partner for something in the past, and no matter what they do, or what you do, you never move past that and that's-- I've been there and it's not a happy place to be. It's pretty miserable for both of you.
Emily: Absolutely, another strategy is sacrifice and there are positive--
Jase: Mutual sacrifices of good maintenance-
Emily: Personal sacrifice.
Dedeker: We worked together- can find the perfect little guinea pig and built an altar.
Emily: Stop talking, okay. No, we're not going there at all, not a guinea pig. There are positive and negative types of sacrifice and we're not talking about the animal sacrifice, which should never happen ever. We're talking about things like avoiding and approaching. There are motives that are more along the lines of trying to avoid something happening or trying to avoid conflict and then you're sacrificing by doing that.
For instance, a denial of personal needs in order to avoid harmful repercussions. A lot of people-pleasing, people tend to do stuff like this, for sure, I definitely know that I do. Whereas a more approach motive is a sacrifice that's motivated by a desire to obtain positive outcomes. What would be a good example of that?
Dedeker: Well, what this makes me think of is, I do think that in relationships people crave an equal feeling exchange of sacrifice. Often this is labeled as compromise or as give and take and I don't quite know if that really does it justice. It could be something like, "I know that my partner's dream is to go to med school and I want to help them fulfill their life dream. That means that maybe I'm going to take on more time at work so that I can support our family while they're in med school." That's like, "I want to obtain this positive outcome from my partner to be happier, maybe for my family to be happier." That's a sacrifice maybe I'm willing to make which is different from, "I'm going to deny my personal needs because I'm afraid of the repercussions," which starts just getting into some really tricky, unhelpful, and probably unhealthy territory.
Emily: That almost seems like a slight mental shift. One could still view it from an avoidance motive and then another person could view it as like approaching, like, "I want to be helpful to my partner."
Dedeker: It could depend on the context, it could be like, "My partner is threatening to leave me unless decide to support the whole family so they go to med school." That could flip things on its head.
Jase: I could see, even the two of these can go together. Actually, that's a good example of the partner wants to go to med school. This is an expensive thing, it's going to take a ton of their time for several years. That's a pretty big deal. Fully avoidance would be, "Well, I might have other things I wanted to do or I didn't want to keep working at this job, or I wanted something else, but I'm just going to, I can't bring that up, because I don't want to cause conflict," and that's negative. On the other hand, I could see the approach motive one could also be negative, too. If it's like, "Why I want them to do that so I'm just going to sacrifice all these things for myself but I'm also just going to avoid speaking up when there's things that I need and maybe the compromise is having some of both of those."
It's like, "Yes, I'm going to do this sacrifice because I want this good for my partner, but also I'm not going to deny my needs entirely and I am going to speak up about," "Okay, can we work together then to find some ways to have better childcare lined up during this or get some way of financing this in a way that I'm not having to work 70 hours a week and maybe just 50," or something like that to work together on both of those at the same time.
Emily: Yes, essentially all around you can do facilitative behavior so you can be generally helpful to your partner as they work towards achieving goals or completing tasks. What comes to mind is acts of service when we talk about love language, that is just something that one could do to be helpful and have emotional intelligence regarding that.
Jase: Their last strategy within this quadrant is what they call dyadic coping. This is basically as the twos of view, how do you cope with stressful situations? How do you provide support to a distressed or stressed partner in a way that you're not absorbing that and then putting that back on them and getting caught in that cycle of giving you're upset and distress back and forth to each other, which is a very easy cycle to get into? For this one, we have an episode 327, that was about compassion fatigue, not too long ago that deals a little bit with this and some techniques and some ways to approach that to help keep yourself from taking on all of that while still being there to support your partner.
Dedeker: I just want to point out that none of these threat mitigation strategies that we've talked about either the individual ones or the interactive ones have anything to do with the threat of other people.
Emily: Did some of the things in the study talk about that?
Dedeker: No.
Emily: No? That's good. Like in any other studies I mean?
Dedeker: You could maybe interpret the whole downplaying the attractiveness of other people, as maybe that probably touches on that but I thought it was really interesting, especially with these interactive ones, of the things that people do together to mitigate threats in their relationship and morally, mostly had to do with internal conflict.
Jase: Those are the real threats, the internal ones and not the external ones.
Dedeker: Those are the real threats to relationships.
Emily: Yes, absolutely.
Dedeker: Do you think that is validating because we try to tell people, rather than trying to build a fortress and build a wall that protects your relationship from threats from the outside, fortify it from the inside, because that's where the threats come from at the end of the day.
Jase: I love that it came from this study that didn't have any agenda of being non-monogamous or anything like that. If we had just came to that conclusion, people would go, "Yes, well, of course, they're going to think that." I think that is really cool and validating that even looking at this study, which didn't have that viewpoint going in. It's like, "Yes, look, it's right there in the data, these are the things that actually matter not those external threats." It's not like, "Let's get together and talk about how you should never spend time with men alone," or something like that.
Dedeker: No one regardless of gender should ever spend time with men alone, nobody. Science says it.
Jase: Science says that. But science did--In this case, science did not say that. To sum up, we have our super fun, pithy tweet for this section on working together to mitigate threats and that is, "Be a team when dealing with internal conflict or external stress, be a team, be a pal." Before we go on to the second half of the episode, in talking about relationship enhancement, we're going to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show. Please take a moment to check out our sponsors, check out our Patreon because it really does help us to keep this content coming to all of you all out there for free.
We're back and now we're switching gears to talk about relationship enhancement. The first quadrant of this is individual and then we're going to talk about the interactive. Individual relationship enhancement, maintenance strategies. God, these titles are so long.
Dedeker: In layman's terms, this is the stuff that you do as an individual, as a person to help progress the relationship or help it feel like it is growing and moving forward.
Emily: Cool.
Dedeker: It's enhancing.
Jase: The first one here is how you think about the relationship, relationship thinking. It's positive reflections about your partner, about the state of your relationship, or about how your family or social network may feel about your relationship. That's an interesting one there, it's cultivating more positive expectations and positive thoughts about not only the relationship but also how people important to you are going to perceive it and react to it. That can be an especially tricky one when it comes to people in non-monogamous relationships, or queer relationships, or something where there might be some more justified fear about that. As much as you can within reason, cultivating that more positive reflections and positive expectations of those outcomes has been shown to actually be helpful in terms of maintaining and improving, and enhancing a relationship. Next one is generosity and that's-- Basically, it's little small acts of kindness. They say, "Giving good things to one spouse by regularly, engaging in small acts of kindness. They found in the study that among married partners, generosity is positively associated with commitment, religiosity, egalitarian division of labor, and marital satisfaction. It's positive for all those things. Then it's negatively associated with marital conflict and perceived divorce likelihood. Basically, people who are more generous are less likely to have marital conflict and less likely to feel like divorces likely.
The religiosity one is interesting. I don't know how they were measuring that, but it sounds like a lot of good things. Better commitment and more egalitarian division of labor, which I thought was a cool one to put in.
Emily: I like that a lot. That's great. The next one we're moving on to is gratitude, which is being thankful and expressing appreciation. Expressions of gratitude, they promote romantic relationship quality through increases of awareness of responsiveness to partners' needs. That's really important to be able to see what your partner wants and needs in a given moment and try to respond to that. That's definitely a nice trait I think, to have and building a culture of appreciation. I love that.
Jase: I think it goes nicely with the previous one about generosity too, being generous, but then also really being appreciative of your partner's generosity too.
Emily: Absolutely. Just love your partner in general, I think. Yes. Especially when you get into a relationship for a long period of time, that appreciation factor maybe doesn't tend to happen as often. That's something really important to continue cultivating. This is from one of the studies. Likewise, this is a quote, "Likewise active, constructive responsiveness, like expressing gratitude and enthusiasm is a skill that can be taught to couples and may have efficacy as an intervention."
Jase: Yes, that you can actually learn that, but you can teach that to a couple and that will potentially get them out of more negative trends and start improving their relationship, or even teach to individuals since this is more on the individual side of things. That's very cool.
Dedeker: Yes, in this context because Emily seemed a little surprised by the use of the word intervention. We're not talking like a drug intervention or anything like that. In a therapeutic context, an intervention is essentially any time it's like, "Oh, I'm the couples therapist and I see that there is an unhealthy communication pattern in here. I'm going to intervene,"-
Emily: I'm going to intervene, got it.
Dedeker: - and be like, "Hey, let's try this." They teach you that's cool.
Emily: Hey, please stop talking and listen to me momentarily.
Dedeker: Please stop what you're doing. Just stop doing what you're doing and do something better.
Jase: Intervention is even used, not in that like, "I'm going to jump in right in this moments," but programs that come in to teach kids in schools, resilience skills for studying and doing their schoolwork is also an intervention. It's any intentional action that you're taking to try to improve a situation is an intervention in psychology terms.
Emily: Lovely. Thank you. Learn something new every day. Hopefully, I wasn't the only one out there that needed an explanation. All of this is related to the stuff we've talked about before regarding sharing a partner's joy, really being present with them when they have a victory, just being there for them and understanding, having an overall understanding and a culture of appreciation in their emotional needs and then your own as well, I think, that's important too.
Dedeker: Our last strategy, our last individual strategy for relationship enhancement. There's a doozy. Let me hit you with this one. This is what they found, partner-focused prayer. Some researchers theorized that partner-focused prayer helps to break those negative thought cycles that we talked about close to the beginning of the episode. Also in some studies, they demonstrated a greater willingness to forgive that influenced that willingness more so than just thinking positive thoughts about a partner. Now, this particular research that it was drawn from probably pretty obviously, was mostly done with white Christians. The people who pray or are most likely to pray.
It's not clear of, "Oh, can we extrapolate anything from this? Can we then apply this to people who don't necessarily ascribe to prayer?" I was wondering maybe it could be extrapolated if it was something like a metta meditation focused on a partner or even just like sending really good and hopeful intentions towards your partner or casting some good spells on your partner. It's like something that goes beyond just thinking good thoughts about them and more of like wishing good things for them or wishing for them to have a better time or an easier time. Doing that on this internal individual basis that maybe would also help with relationship maintenance over time.
Jase: I do think there's something there to the idea of because in this case, they compared it to just positive thoughts about a partner that this partner-focused prayer gave a greater willingness to forgive. I could see something like metta meditation or some other visualization exercise. That might be more helpful than positive thoughts because I would bet in this study it was just that think about some good things about your partner. Imagine them being great versus prayer, where I feel like people tend to a little out of their own way in that case in a way that you don't, if it's just like, "Oh, I'm going to think of some positive things," that can still be self-focused-
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: -versus prayer, which is this, I'm letting go of this a little bit. I feel like I'm maybe getting some outside support perhaps in a way. I could see something that's a little more structured as a way of looking at the bigger picture around things and cultivating love and care for that partner rather than just thinking about how nice their triceps look or something.
Dedeker: Triceps. This is my tweetable takeaway. This is my summation of all these individual relationship enhancement strategies, which is just give kindness, gratitude, and powerful magics to your partner. However powerful magics are designed for you. If that's prayer, if that's meditation, if that's visualization, if that is casting a really nice spell, then, yes, I think you should do that. There are times I ask Jase to cast spells on me.
Emily: I cast some spell on you.
Jase: Yeah, that’s right.
Dedeker: There are some days where I come in and I'm really stressed or I can't get my brain out of work mode or something. I'll like ask Jase, like, can you cast a spell on me to help me get out of work mode? He will commit to the bed. Let me tell you he is a powerful spellcaster.
Emily: Oh.
Dedeker: There's something really nice about it. Let's do a little bit of silly ritual together, that actually feels really good. I like this idea of it being my own internal secret spell casting that I do with my partners on a day-to-day basis.
Jase: I think again, it's that you're doing something that takes you out of just yourself. It's not but just like, "Hey, don't stress. Hey, it's okay. Hey, you're okay." It almost doing a little ritual, even if it's a jokey silly one like we do, still gets you a little bit out of that very stress-focused way of thinking. Are we ready for the final quadrant?
Emily: Yes, final quadrant to me.
Jase: This is an interactive relationship enhancement maintenance strategies. In other words, the things that you and your partner can do together to enhance the relationship. The first of these is communicative relationship maintenance strategies, which are things like having positive interaction patterns, having just more positive interactions, basically. It's openness, being willing to be vulnerable, share about yourself, and assurances that the relationship has a future. It's things like sharing tasks and engaging together in social networks.
I don't know if they meant just your circle of friends or if they meant literally social networks online.
Dedeker: They definitely did not mean social networks online. They definitely meant you and your partner together-
Jase: Shared friends. -
Dedeker: -engaging with shared friends and family and your circle.
Jase: That makes sense. They also put into this category, relationship talks about the state of the relationship. Basically RADAR, I'm I right? Basically what these researchers said was you should be doing Multiamory's relationship RADAR regularly. There it is, Science.
Dedeker: There it is and they somehow knew that in 2017, before we even created RADAR, they found it.
Emily: It was not created yet. It was scrum then.
Dedeker: Right yes, it was in its infancy.
Emily: They know.
Jase: They saw it coming. They were like, "We know this will happen, just trust us.
Emily: Indeed it did.
Jase: Yes. Communication maintenance in terms of having more positive, more open communication with each other. Then also just communicating more completely about the state of the relationship. Then the next one is social support and responsiveness to partners, concerns, needs, desires, et cetera. This goes back a little bit to some things we talked about in the individual relationship enhancement stuff of just things like appreciation or being helpful to a partner. This also emphasized this in the together section as well of how can we be responsive to concerns, needs, desires. Probably talking about them at a RADAR would help with that too, to really be aware of those things.
This also creates an emotional bond of showing appreciation for your partner's personal qualities. It's matching emotions with them like responding to their emotions and being there with them and understanding both verbal and nonverbal communication. Again, just go back a couple of episodes to look at nonverbal communication, and then also episode 216 on emotional support.
Emily: Also, something that you two just talked about is humor. It can be used to cope with stressful situations and maintain your relationship. Humor's great. I feel like that's a trait that so many people out there want in a partner. "I want someone that makes me laugh," and it's true. Although, humor, just so we talk about this as well, though humor is correlated with playfulness, positive emotional satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and quality and closeness, also things like problem resolution, there is potentially a negative effect if it's used to ridicule partners.
That I do see from time to time and it can be pretty cringe-worthy from the outside, even in those jibs and jabs they happen. If it's really putting another person down, then that's not a good thing. Also joint leisure activities. These activities that we're talking about in terms of joint leisure activities, they need to include really high levels of interaction. Not necessarily just sitting on a couch passively and watching TV, which we all love to do, but maybe something like going on a hike or going on a trip or doing something unique and special with the other person.
This is from another quote from one of the studies, "Compared to quantity, the quality of time spent in joint leisure activities is more strongly associated with marital satisfaction." That makes a lot of sense. We talk about those new things that partners have to do as well.
Jase: This reminds me of some conversations we've had before about that idea of a lot of times, people, particularly when opening up a relationship will really struggle with feeling like I'm not getting enough quality time with my partner now or not enough with the new partner or whatever it is and that changing that focus from an amount of time to the quality of time can make a really big difference and help get you more focused on what is it that I actually do want from this? What do I really need from these interactions for me to feel really good?
Maybe it is totally changing up what kinds of things you do together, or just occasionally doing more novel, new things instead of just doing the same thing every week or something like that. I love that this one's in here and that high levels of interaction, I do think, is really key to this.
Emily: Our pithy takeaway from interactive relationship enhancement maintenance strategies is, check in with your partner and have some fun. Yay.
Dedeker: Yay.
Jase: These are all so short. We've saved so much room for hashtags galore, maybe some emoji. There's just a lot you can add to these. All right, let's recap. These are our four main, very short tweetable takeaways. Number one for individual threat mitigation, think good thoughts about your partner, give them the benefit of the doubt. Second one, which is from interactive threat mitigation, be a team when dealing with internal conflict or external stress.
The third one is from individual relationship enhancement which is, give kindness, gratitude, and powerful magics to your partner. Then number four is the interactive relationship enhancement, which is, check-in with your partner and have fun, have some freaking fun. I'd added extra words, few more characters, but don't worry. You still have plenty of room for hashtags.
Dedeker: Well, tweet away, add all the emojis that you want. It's going to be great. This study actually had so much more information. Of course, they're quoting information from over a thousand studies so there's just so, so, so much more that we could be talking about. Some of it is going into our bonus episode. In our bonus episode, we're going to be talking about what this review found about maintenance strategies for marginalized relationships, as well as long-distance relationships. Then we'll also be spending a little bit of time about maintenance strategies for non-monogamous relationships in particular.