The stereotype of an old married couple is one where the
partners are constantly finishing each other’s sentences. They have been together so long, they can
predict each other’s orders at restaurants and guess what movies they will want
to see.
At the same time, there is a nagging sense that this can’t
really be the way long-term relationships affect people. People who have been married for years will
complain about the presents that their spouses buy for them wondering if their
long-term partner really knows them at all.
So, how well do couples really understand each other’s likes
and dislikes?
This question was explored in a paper by Benjamin
Schiebehenne, Jutta Mata, and Peter Todd in the April, 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
They compared young couples (generally people in their 20s)
who had been together for around 2 years to older couples (people in their late
60s and 70s) who had been together for around 40 years. Each member of a couple judged preferences
for about 40 examples of each of three types of items. One type (foods) was one that had high daily
relevance. A second type (movies) a
common but not daily part of people’s lives.
A third type (kitchen furnishings) was low in daily relevance. Each person rated how much they liked the
items and also how much they thought their partner liked the items. Finally, each person estimated the number of
their predictions for their partner’s preferences that they thought they got
correct.
As you might expect, the more frequently something is
encountered, the more accurate people’s beliefs about their partner’s
preferences. Overall, people were best
able to judge their partner’s preferences for foods. They were least accurate at judging their
partner’s preferences for kitchen designs.
Their judgments about movies came out in between.
The more surprising result is that the younger couples were
far more accurate at making these judgments overall than the older
couples. So, couples who had been
together for only 2 years were 5-10% more accurate at judging their partner’s
preferences than the couples who had been together for 40 years.
The older couples were far more confident in the accuracy of
their predictions than the younger couples.
Thus, the older couples believed they knew more about their partner’s
preferences than the younger couples even though their actual predictions were
less accurate.
Why does this happen?
When studying a topic like this, it is hard to do a true
experiment. You can’t randomly assign
people to be in long-term relationships.
So, it is hard to know exactly why couples get less accurate over time.
One thing that may be happening is that younger couples
spend a lot of effort trying to learn about each other. They are paying more careful attention to
preferences, because the relationship is new.
Older couples have already learned a lot about each
other. There are a few factors that may
affect the accuracy of their predictions in the long-run. First, the older couples may not notice
changes in their partner’s preferences over time, because they are focused on
what their partner liked early in the relationship.
Second, partners often compromise over things they do, and
that can affect beliefs about preferences.
For example, a man might like action movies, while his wife is not so
wild about them. However, she might go
to see action movies with him just so that they can watch movies together. Over time, then, he might think his wife
likes these movies more than she actually does.
In this case, her compromise has masked her true preferences. This compromise often helps couples to share
each other’s lives, but it does influence the accuracy of perceptions partners
have of each other.
One issue that has not been explored is whether being
accurate is valuable. It is important
that the older couples in this study had all been together for about 40
years. That means that these couples had
successfully navigated the difficulties of long-term relationships in a world
where 50% of marriages end in divorce.
So, even though we think that knowing our partners accurately is a good
thing, it is possible that something about what makes relationships successful
in the long-term also decreases our knowledge about what our partners like.
