In this study you and your romantic partner:
- Will complete a short (5 minute) online survey every night for one week.
- Attend a 45-50 minute laboratory session in our Pasadena, CA Lab; directly after both of you will fill out a series of questionnaires and get instructions for the second week.
- Complete in-person discussions at home with your romantic partner that following week.
- Complete a short (5 minute) online follow-up one month after.

Each couple that successfully completes this research study will receive $150 USD.

Participation in this research involves completing questionnaires online (approx. 1 hr), completing an experimental session (approx. 2hr), and a brief memory task. Questionnaires will ask about your relationship and personality. The experimental session will examine your emotional and physiological responses to feedback from your partner. Some questions are of a personal nature (e.g. relationship history).

You must be currently involved in a long-term romantic relationship and both you and your partner must be 18 years of age or older. Both you and your partner must be able to participate in this research together and attend one lab session at the UCLA Psychology Department together.

As compensation for volunteering in this research, each partner will receive $30 for their time ($60 per couple). You will also be compensated for parking at the UCLA campus. For more information please contact Joshua Poore, M.A., Doctoral Candidate, UCLA Department of Psychology. Phone: 310 971 3173; Email: romrelationships@yahoo.com.

Reprinted from Greater Good magazine, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring/Summer 2004). For more information, please visit www.greatergoodmag.org

Despite the optimism of newlyweds, most marriages eventually end in divorce. Marriage counselors often advise couples to treat each other more affectionately, to express empathy, and to learn to compromise on each other’s behalf. This seems like reasonable advice, but for many people it also seems to be difficult advice to follow.

So thinking about marriage raises some general questions about the challenges of improving human behavior. How can we inspire people to act in each other’s best interests? How is it that people put the needs of others before their own, and how can we get people to do this more often? How, basically, can we get people to be nicer to each other?

These are questions that philosophers and social scientists have grappled with for centuries. The 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that humans were not individually capable of transcending their selfish natures and so suggested that the function of government is to rein in our basic impulses. In the absence of governmental restraints, he wrote in his Leviathan, life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” In other words, people will be nice to others only when forced to do so. In the mid-20th century, B.F. Skinner and other “behaviorist” psychologists said the only sure way to get people to help each other is to make it personally rewarding for them to do so. In other words, people will be nice to others only when it benefits themselves.

Both these views of human nature suggest that cooperative behavior is inherently fragile. Take away the constraints or the rewards, and cooperation should fall apart.

Our research has a very different take on human nature. As researchers who have devoted our careers to studying the first few years of marriage, we have focused on the phenomenon of compassionate love between spouses. We care about compassionate love because we expect it to inspire positive behaviors toward others, behaviors like self-sacrifice, tolerance, charity, and support. Compassionate lovers break free from the Hobbesian and the behaviorist worldview because compassionate lovers do these things even at a cost to the self, and even when they are not forced to do so by social constraints. Thus our attempts to identify the causes and correlates of compassionate love in marriage seem to be a step in a new and promising direction toward understanding positive human relations.

But is it so new? A second glance at definitions of compassionate love reveals a paradox, perhaps a contradiction, that brings us uncomfortably back to the behaviorists’ ideas. In current thinking, it is not enough for compassionate lovers to put the needs of others before their own. They have to delight in doing it. They have to be fulfilled by advancing the growth of another person. This does not sound selfless any more. Indeed, the behaviorists see an element of selfishness in even the most selfless behavior.

Compassionate love researchers do not really disagree with this. Current views of compassionate love do not preclude taking pleasure in the benefit of others, but rather feature that pleasure as a central element. In specifying what compassionate love is, then, the challenge is to figure out how to reconcile these elements of selflessness and self-interest.

We have been developing a model of compassionate love between spouses that may help resolve this paradox. Our research has shown that newlyweds who fit our definition of compassionate lovers do in fact have longer, more supportive marriages. In this essay we will present our model of compassionate love and our data showing the benefits of compassionate love in marriage. But first we will briefly explain why we think marriage is an especially relevant area in which to study compassionate love.

First, to the extent that compassionate love promotes behavior that benefits another person, compassionate love should be an important, even crucial, element of a successful marriage. One should expect spouses who love each other compassionately to stay together longer, be happier, and support each other more effectively than couples who do not love each other compassionately. Conversely, it is hard to imagine a successful marriage in which spouses are not able, at least occasionally, to put each other’s needs before their own.

Second, learning how to foster truly compassionate love between spouses seems to be a necessary first step toward promoting compassionate love toward humanity as a whole. If we cannot find a way for husbands and wives, who know each other and have vowed to honor each other, to be compassionate, then promoting compassion toward strangers is going to be a difficult nut to crack.

Third, newlyweds are an appropriate place to distinguish between compassionate love and other kinds of love. As you might imagine, newlyweds all claim to love one another. We have interviewed hundreds of newlyweds, and when we asked them, “Do you love your partner?” they look at us like we’re crazy. They get offended by the question: “Of course, I love my partner. We just got married!” Furthermore, they tend to score high on every kind of love scale thrown at them. Newlyweds are passionate, companionate, they like and love each other, and when asked, they profess their undying willingness to make sacrifices for each other. And yet not all of these couples love each other in the same way. Studying newlyweds closely may suggest ways of teasing apart the compassionate lovers from the other lovers.

A model of compassionate love

Our model rests on the premise that love for a partner originates in a variety of beliefs and judgments, ranging from perceptions of the partner’s specific traits and abilities (e.g., My partner is a great cook) to global evaluations of the partner as a whole (e.g., My partner is to global evaluations of the partner as a whole (e.g., My partner is the greatest). There are two important implications of this model. First, spouses who believe their partners to be wonderful people overall may still hold a range of positive and negative beliefs about their partners’ specific qualities. Second, these perceptions of a partner’s specific qualities may not necessarily agree with the partner’s self-image. While some spouse’s specific views of their partners may be unrealistically positive or negative, other spouses may see their partners as their partners see themselves. Among happily married couples, then, some spouses may demonstrate a deep understanding of their partners’ specific qualities, whereas other spouses may have little insight into their partners’ qualities.

We suggest that compassionate love may be a love that recognizes the partner’s specific positive and negative qualities, while simultaneously affirming the partner’s overall worth. Purely romantic love, in contrast, may be defined as love that glorifies the partner without understanding the partner’s specific qualities. While the romantic lover holds the partner in high esteem, ignoring faults and weaknesses, the compassionate lover holds the partner in high esteem while at the same time recognizing and even embracing specific faults and weaknesses.

What makes this love compassionate? Consider that if we truly believed that everything about our partners was fabulous, then loving them would not be very difficult. Indeed, some spouses may not be able to love their partners unless they view each of their partners’ specific traits favorably. In this case, the spouse may be unwilling to accept a partner’s faults, and once the partner’s less-than-perfect traits become apparent, the spouse’s love for the partner may dissipate. However, understanding and accepting a partner’s specific strengths and weaknesses may represent a selfless act, in that spouses endure the costs of their partners’ faults, weaknesses, and limitations—but love them anyway. Compassionate love is personally fulfilling, in that spouses can reap the rewards of their love, but it is also selfless, in that spouses accept their partners for who they are, the good and the bad.

The goal of our research has been to identify spouses who compassionately love their partners and to examine the implications of compassionate love for marital well-being. To address these issues, we have been following 250 newly-married couples over the first four years of their marriage. When these couples were first married, we asked spouses not only to rate their current feelings about their marriage, but also to report on their global and specific evaluations of themselves and their partners. That is, we asked spouses whether they considered themselves and their partner to be good, worthy people, and we also asked them to rate themselves and their partners on numerous specific traits and abilities, such as intellectual ability, social skills, extraversion, and conscientiousness.

We found that virtually all spouses reported they were extremely happy with their marriage and that they held their partner in the highest regard. In fact, most spouses viewed their partners as better, more worthy people than even the partners viewed themselves to be. However, spouses varied significantly in the extent to which they understood their partners’ self-perceived traits and abilities. Thus, only a subset of these loving, newly-married couples seemed to be engaging in compassionate love, in which a globally positive view of the partner is linked to an accurate understanding of the partner’s specific strengths and weaknesses.

We also found a connection between spouses’ understanding of their partners’ traits and the quality of the couple’s interactions. We had couples engage in a series of tasks in which each spouse was asked to choose a personal problem or difficulty they were facing and discuss that problem with their partner. A panel of independent observers then rated the supportiveness of the partner’s behaviors during the discussion. Wives who displayed a greater understanding of their husbands’ specific traits were rated as providing better support to their husbands in these interactions than were wives with less understanding of their husbands’ qualities. Given that all couples reported being very happy with their partner and the marriage, these results suggest that caring for a partner may not be enough to provide positive social support. Instead, it seems that holding each other in high esteem while also understanding one another’s specific qualities may allow spouses to give both the loving encouragement and the specific information necessary to support a partner effectively.

Loving a partner compassionately also seems to contribute to marital stability over time. We found that when wives had a deeper understanding of their husbands’ specific qualities, the couple was less likely to divorce over the first four years of marriage. Importantly, this finding held regardless of whether the wives’ specific views of their husbands were positive or negative. In other words, it was only when wives understood their partner’s traits, not necessarily when they viewed those traits positively, that the marriage fared better over time.

Why did marriages only seem to benefit when wives understood their partners’ specific qualities? Husbands varied significantly in their understanding of their wives, such that some husbands understood their wives’ traits and abilities better than other husbands. However, husbands’ understanding was not associated with their support abilities or with couples’ likelihood of divorce. One possible reason for this apparent gender difference may be that husbands’ understanding of their wives’ qualities has different effects on the relationship. For instance, while husbands’ support skills may not be helped by an understanding of their wives’ qualities, behavioral skills that we didn’t study here, such as their conflict resolution abilities, may be enhanced in husbands when they understand their wives’ specific traits. Further research is needed into the influence that husbands’ specific understanding may have on marital processes. At this point, however, we have no reason to believe that understanding is not a good thing for both spouses.

The implications of knowing and adoring

Overall, these findings suggest that loving a partner compassionately may have important benefits for marriage. First, compassionate love has benefits for the beloved. While it may be good to be the object of love, it is better to be the object of a love that is coupled with understanding. When spouses are both loved and understood, they are likely to get better support from their partners. Second, compassionate love has benefits for the lover. Wives who loved their husbands compassionately were in marriages that were less likely to dissolve over time. Spouses whose initial feelings of love were based on a relatively accurate understanding of the partners’ specific qualities began the marriage accepting their partners’ limitations. These spouses should not be surprised by their partners’ negative qualities and thus should be less likely to react poorly when their partners’ weaknesses surface over the course of the relationship.

It is important to emphasize that understanding a partner’s specific qualities by itself did not enhance marital quality. Nor did simply loving the partner. Rather, it was the combination of loving and understanding the partner that was associated with better marital quality. It seems that spouses in healthy, stable marriages may love their partners in spite of (or perhaps because of) their less-than-perfect specific traits.

How can we foster compassionate love both within marriage and between people in general? The advice just to love one another is too simple. Love without understanding is not enough, not helpful, not likely to enhance relationships. Understanding may be the key to empathy and love.

Benjamin R. Karney, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida and the director of the Florida Marriage Project. Lisa A. Neff, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the University of Florida.

Reprinted with permission from from Greater Good magazine, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring/Summer 2004). For more information, please visit www.greatergoodmag.org

David A. Kenny, Ph.D., University of Connecticut

Writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare have stated that “Love is blind,” but is it really? We might think that people would be very highly motivated to truly understand their relationship partners. After all, if they make a poor choice, they suffer the negative consequences. Additionally, romantic partners, especially in the early stages of their relationship, are actively seeking information about their partner. Lovers spend a great deal of time together and they share with each other their most intimate secrets. We might think that lovers have their eyes wide open and they are not so blind.

Various groups of researchers have shown that lovers can be blind. Important research by Sandra Murray and colleagues has consistently shown that idealization of the partner (that is, seeing them as better than they really are) is endemic to close relationships and predictive of relationship satisfaction. Maybe then love is blind?

In my own research, I have shown that people in relationships are accurate to some extent, but they are also biased in how they view their partner. With Linda Acitelli of the University of Houston, we asked married and dating couples various questions, e.g., how much they liked their job and how satisfied they were in their sex life. We also asked them to guess how their partner answered each question. We found that people were both accurate (they could predict how their partner responded), but they were also biased in the sense that they assumed that their partner felt the same as they did. Interestingly, accuracy exceeded bias when the topic was non-threatening (e.g., job satisfaction), but bias exceeded accuracy when the topic was threatening (e.g., satisfaction with sex).

Currently, Tessa West and I are extending this research in three areas. First, we are studying roommates over time and we are especially focusing on inter-racial roommates. Second, we are examining accuracy and bias in family members’ perceptions of each other. Third, we are studying accuracy and bias in romantic relationships. Couples are given an incentive to accurately judge how attracted their romantic partners are to alternative partners, after being told that the alternative partners are highly attracted to their partners. In all three studies, we expect threat to increase bias and reduce accuracy.

Participants should be recently engaged, over 18 and women under 35. This should be a first-marriage for both partners, and neither should have children. Both partners should be able to converse easily in English, have at least a 10th grade education, and have no immediate plans to move outside of the greater Los Angeles area. Couples will be assessed several times over the course of their marriage, with initial compensation no less than $300 and increasing over time.

Thomas Bradbury, Ph.D, is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Illinois and completed his clinical internship at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Dr. Bradbury is the editor of The Psychology of Marriage (with Frank Fincham,1990) and The Developmental Course of Marital Dysfunction (1998). He is a member of the Risk Prevention and Health Behavior Review Committee at the National Institute of Mental Health, and he is an editorial board member for several journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, the Journal of Family Psychology, and the Journal of Marriage and the Family. Dr. Bradbury is the recipient of the 1997 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions from the American Psychological Association and has twice received the Reuben Hill Award for Research and Theory on Marriage from the National Council on Family Relations. Dr. Bradbury currently conducts basic research on the longitudinal course of marriage, with particular emphasis on laboratory observation and interview methods. A central goal of this work is to understand how newlywed couples negotiate the first several years of marriage (which constitute the period of highest risk for marital disruption) and to clarify the factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of couples having stable, satisfying relationships. Findings from this research are being used to develop an intervention program for couples planning marriage, and an experimental version of this program is now being tested to examine its effects on marital disruption over a 3-year period.

Click here for more information about Dr. Bradbury.

Click here for more information on the UCLA Marriage Lab.