With Valentine’s Day around the corner, I’m sure a lot of you have relationships on your mind. So, if you are in one, a new study seems to indicate that you can determine your happiness level and predict whether you’ll be in it 6 months from now, based on your IM messages between you and your significant other.
If you had any doubts that we are in the technical age, I think the fact that a journal called Personal Relationships did a study on IM patterns between lovers, proves it.
The UCLA researchers took 10 days of instant-message conversations from nearly 70 U.S. couples who had been dating for about one and a half years and had an average age of 19, and read through the conversations, noting the context of the IM threads. Then, they used a linguistic word count program to analyze the conversations’ pronouns and words with emotional content.
Here were the results:
1. Among pronouns in IMs, couples used “I” nearly 20 times more frequently than “we.” And of the emotion words, all couples were most likely to use positive words.
2. The extent to which people used positive emotion words like ‘great,’ ‘happy,’ ‘love,’ tended to be happier in their relationships and to stay in their relationships for a longer period of time.
3. Women who IMed with lots of “I’s” were 30 percent more likely to stay in their relationships compared with other women.
Does this mean we’re all narcissistic and self centered, and such qualities make for harmonious relationships? At first, this seemed counterintuitive to me, because it would seem that a healthy couple would be using “we” more often.
But it makes sense when you think that most truly healthy relationships accommodate each person retaining their individuality. Another theory by the researchers, which rings true to me, is that since women tend to be more emotionally expressive in general and tend to be more disclosing in general, it indicates they would be happy in a relationship that allows them to express themselves, and share about themselves.
Lead researcher, Richard Slatcher said, ”So this finding suggests that beyond women wanting to disclose more and disclosing more in their everyday life, that when they do disclose more in their relationships, they’re happier in those relationships.”
I’m still waiting for the study that determines why couples who have been together a year or longer, are instant messaging in the first place, and not talking on the phone or in person. Hmmm……could it be that avoidance of each other keeps couples together? I’m placing my money on that theory.
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I definitely don’t think it is avoidance — my husband and I talk more on Gchat than on the phone or in person, because of our work schedules. He is a medicine intern in the hospital, working 90-100 hours/week (those 80 hour residence rules are crap), and I’m a Ph.D. student in the lab often as much as him. While it would be inappropriate for us to be on the phone at our respective locations, if we both happen to be working on something online, we will chat that way. In June, he is moving several states away for his residency, and I will be here. We will see each other once a month at most, and honestly, a lot of times with the hours we work, we just need downtime to ourselves to relax. A phone conversation can require too much effort if you are exhausted and lack the capacity to focus 100% on each other, whereas an online chat can go at a slow pace, perhaps while he plays playstation to unwind and I knit. That is not to say that we won’t talk on the phone — I am sure we will for 5-10 minutes every night — but when you work twice as many hours as a normal job, you need to fit in your own personal relaxation and enjoyment wherever possible, so we’d rather each other continue to do what we need to unwind, and casually chat online in the meantime.