3 Signs Your Partner Is a Sentimental Person

With all the focus in psychology on dark personality traits, it may be difficult to remember that most people actually have a good side. When it comes to romantic relationships, you may find warnings in this research about what to avoid, not what to seek. Yet, in reality, romantic relationships are based on the building up of positive experiences and feelings. It is more likely that your partner has your best intentions in mind, not your worst.

It is this fundamental assumption that prompted the University of Geneva’s Florian Cova and the University of Lima’s Jordane Boudesseul to explore the quality of sentimentality or the feelings of being “moved” or “touched.” Their recent publication (2023) builds on this idea, providing a new angle to the understanding of close relationships.

Sentimentality as a Desirable Quality

As Cova and Boudesseul note, “feelings of being moved play an important role in our lives." They allow people to appreciate art and music but also to act altruistically toward others. Previous research in this relatively unexplored area identified short-term benefits of sentimentality but not the longer-term ways that these feelings shape people’s lives. Having a partner high in this quality, you might imagine, could help you share in those long-term benefits.

With no available measure at their disposal to investigate sentimentality, the U. Geneva-U. Lima team began to compile a list of statements based on prior theoretical work. They focused not only on feelings of being moved but also their physiological counterparts (lump in the throat, tears, goosebumps). These statements did not, in order to focus on emotionality, ask about actions that sentimental people might take, such as buying flowers for a romantic partner to celebrate an anniversary.

The 3 Sentimentality Factors

Across five online studies with samples of adult participants, Cova and Boudesseul refined their original scale and then proceeded to test its ability to predict some of those specific actions and reactions that sentimental people might experience. The "Geneva Sentimentality Scale" (GSS) that this work produced contains the following 10 items, divided into three factors. You can rate yourself (and think about how your partner might rate) by indicating your agreement (1= not at all to 5= totally):

Factor 1:

1. I often feel moved.

2. I often feel touched.

3. I am rarely moved (reversed).

Factor 2:

4. I often shed tears of joy.

5. I often cry while having a warm feeling in my heart because I find something beautiful.

6. I often feel a lump in my throat and get tears in my eyes, even though I am not sad.

7. In the last month, there were many occasions in which I wanted to cry because I felt moved.

Factor 3:

8. It often warms my heart when people tell me touching stories.

9. Listening to a moving story often gives me a warm sensation in the chest.

10. Witnessing or hearing about positive stories often makes me experience a warm feeling in my heart.

Across these three factors, the average scores per item among the study sample ranged from a low of 2.4 (item 6) to a high of 3.9 (item 7), with most people scoring within about 1 point above and below these averages. Other low-scoring items were 3, 4, and 5.

As you can see, sentimentality is not an uncommon feeling, although crying for no reason seems to be an outlier. This item may relate more to feelings of depression than to the concept here under study, feeling “moved” and not just sad.

Part of the validation process in the Cova and Boudesseul study involved determining how people who varied in sentimentality would react to situations that might provoke strong feelings. These situations, responses to videos, are very much like the ones you might encounter with your romantic partner if you sit down together to watch a movie or a “feel good” story on TV. One showed “lovers kissing and aging together,” a second showed a man displaying altruistic behavior toward “people, animals, and even plants,” and the third “a person with a disability displaying a stunning performance at a singing contest.”

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Now, think about how you and your partner might react to these videos. The findings showed that, compared to older measures in the literature, the GSS was the best predictor of feelings of being moved or touched. Other validation studies conducted by the authors also showed that the GSS predicted being moved or touched in daily life, including experiences of listening to music.

There was one additional finding that you might consider if you want a quick and easy way to scope out a potential partner’s sentimentality levels. The single item “I often feel moved” might suffice, although, from a research point of view, this did not meet the validation criteria.

Finding the Sentimentality in Your Partner

These findings might give you some clues to look for in a potential romantic partner if sentimentality is indeed a quality you desire. However, what if you’re already in a committed relationship with a partner who doesn’t appear to be so easily moved?

The items on the GSS provide you with some talking points that you can use to start this conversation. Although your partner may put on a stoical side, it’s possible that inwardly they do experience feelings of being moved, sometimes for no reason. You can also use the stimulus of watching a romantic movie together as the beginning of this exploration. Sharing your own reactions may allow your partner to feel more comfortable sharing theirs.

The situations that the authors used to probe emotional reactions were also not particularly “artsy.” They included watching a scientific documentary or going to a science museum. Who knows—maybe a show about the intelligence of the octopus could become the basis for the sharing of positive emotions.

To sum up, the quality of sentimentality might not rise to the top when you consider the factors that promote successful relationships. By using the three factors of the GSS, you and your partner might find surprising new ways to expand and deepen your emotional connections.