Can't tally love: Tracking favours may hurt relationship, UTM research indicates

They say that love is a two-way street, but that may only hold true to a point. 

It turns out that couples who obsess over equal give-and-take may be sabotaging their relationship, a study involving University of Toronto Mississauga researchers suggests.

“When your support to your partner is tied to a desire for them to repay you, it can feel less like care and more like leverage,” says study co-author and UTM psychology professor Emily Impett.

The findings are contained in a paper authored by Impett, former UTM graduate student Haeyoung Gideon Park and two other researchers from the University of Alberta and the University of Michigan. 

The research focuses on so-called “exchange orientation,” which in intimate partnerships is the tendency to expect direct reciprocation from your partner when providing a benefit.

Impett, who directs UTM’s Relationships and Well-Being Laboratory, says the group undertook the study to fill gaps they perceived in the decades of research on this aspect of romantic relationships.

Impett and her team were curious about how exchange orientation evolves over time between romantic partners, and how it affects relationship satisfaction. They also wanted to know how similar levels of this orientation between partners affects a couple’s happiness.

For their data source, the researchers turned to the German Family Panel, a 2008 longitudinal study on partnership and family dynamics among Germans that spanned 13 years. 

They homed in on responses from interviews that had been conducted with 7,293 mixed-gender couples. While the data didn’t include enough same-gender couples to allow for a meaningful analysis, Impett expects their findings to apply to this population as well.

The researchers discovered that exchange orientation – or the expectation of paying a partner back – tended to decline over the course of a relationship. They theorize this may be because as closeness between partners increases, couples feel less need to engage in regular scorekeeping of give-and-take.

“They may be transitioning to becoming more communal — they’re sharing resources and they both feel a sense of responsibility for each other,” Impett speculates.

However, couples who were slower to relinquish that tit-for-tat mindset demonstrated steeper declines in their relationship satisfaction.

So while direct reciprocation may be considered more equitable, the results suggest it may not be a recipe for happiness long-term.

“If you don't move away from those norms as relationships progress, then that's spelling trouble,” Impett says.

What about those couples who were equally exchange oriented? You might think this parity would have served them well — but the researchers found this similarly did not contribute to relationship satisfaction.

“Both partners being high in something that is typically negative doesn’t tend to be a good thing,” Impett says.

In considering the adverse effects of a transactional approach in relationships, Impett says it creates a condition where each partner is monitoring the give-take ratio and feels compelled to enforce fairness, which can detract from their sense of appreciation for each other.

“When people are thinking about, ‘am I getting as much as I’m giving,’ it could make people interpret actions in a more adversarial way,” she says. “People feel less grateful for their partner and the things their partner does for them.”

A healthy balance of give-and-take is nonetheless important to a happy relationship, Impett says, and this can be achieved when both partners take a long view to reciprocity and communicate about perceived gaps in mutual care.

“Most couples want a sense that their relationship is broadly fair and mutual. So think about whether the relationship is balanced over time, versus in this moment,” Impett says. 

“Pay attention to what your partner needs, trusting that the care will be mutual in the long run, and then try to repair things when it feels one-sided.”