How to Persuade Your Romantic Partner to Commit

“How to get him (or her) to commit?" This question is often a central concern, especially as relationships progress over time. Maintaining a high level of commitment is also important for the longevity of a relationship—particularly to reduce the chances of infidelity, cheating, divorce, and break up. For this reason, ample research has been directed at why people do or don’t commit.

Until recently, however, research has viewed commitment largely as a passive outcome of other relationship factors. There has been little research about how an individual can actively influence the commitment level of their partner. Fortunately, a recent article has taken a deep dive into that topic. Here are active and persuasive strategies to influence your partner’s level of commitment!

Understanding Commitment

The topic of influencing a partner’s commitment was recently explored by Machia, Tan, and Agnew (2024). Within that work, the team first surveyed the existing research on romantic relationship commitment, noting several factors that affected the strength of that commitment between partners. Specifically, following the Investment Model of Commitment Processes (Rusbult, Agnew, and Arriaga, 2012), they identified five factors that influence commitment in romantic relationships:

• Satisfaction: The relationship provides positive outcomes, especially those that go beyond the individual’s expectations.
• Alternatives: There are no other available relationship partners who could provide better outcomes.
• Investment: A significant amount of resources (time, money, effort) have already been put into the relationship, and losing them would be costly.
• Future Plans: There is an agreement about the attainment of shared future goals within the relationship.
• Subjective Norms: The relationship is supported by friends, family, and society.

Machia, Tan, and Agnew (2024) then describe how an individual could use those five factors to both evaluate and influence a partner’s level of commitment. Regarding evaluation, an individual could pay attention to their partner’s satisfaction with the relationship, access to alternative partners, investments, plans together, and the support of family and friends, to get an overall sense of that partner’s level of commitment. By evaluating those factors in your relationship, you could better understand your own partner’s level of commitment—and decide whether greater commitment was required for your relationship goals.

Influencing Commitment

If you evaluate a partner’s level of commitment and feel it is lacking, what can you do? Machia, Tan, and Agnew (2024) suggest, that by actively influencing one or more of the factors above, an individual could raise (or lower) their partner’s feelings of commitment. Furthermore, aligning with advice in my book Attraction Psychology (Nicholson, 2022) and my other posts, they offer some suggestions to make that happen.

Satisfaction often centers on a partner’s feelings and practical outcomes. Therefore, doing things to make a partner feel good and showing gratitude for their contributions could improve their satisfaction. Beyond that, touching a partner affectionately and sharing positive experiences is also effective. Overall, the idea is to create a mutually rewarding relationship that makes both you and your partner happy and satisfied.

Alternatives and other potential romantic partners affect commitment levels too. Nevertheless, it is difficult to reduce a partner’s access to others without seeming jealous or controlling. Fortunately, it is possible to highlight your unique features, and be a little hard-to-get, to make yourself a more exclusive option than those alternatives. Combined with the satisfaction above, this can make your relationship feel special and sacred as well.

Investment of time, effort, money, and resources also influences commitment, primarily through the sunk costs effect. Essentially, the more one gives and invests in a relationship, the harder it is to walk away and feel like you have wasted those efforts. As a result, it is possible to increase romantic commitment from your partner by asking for real behavioral and monetary investment from them. Or, as I’ve said elsewhere, make them love you by taking, not giving. As noted above, however, make sure to reward them with your gratitude when they invest too!

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Future Plans are also a form of emotional investment influencing commitment. Just talking about long-term plans affects thinking. Similarly, defining relationship goals influences the level of effort put into a relationship too. Therefore, you can also increase a partner’s commitment by discussing future goals and plans with them—especially by ironing out the details of where, when, and how exactly you’re going to complete them together. That is because those plans should turn into actual investments within a specific and mutually agreeable period (moving in together, getting engaged). Discussing those plans by using we-talk language (using “we” instead of “you and I”) can help too!

Subjective Norms and interactions with family and friends influence commitment within a romantic relationship too. Therefore, simply integrating a partner into your circle of family and friends, and vice versa, can help to strengthen their ties to you. Just using social media to share your relationship status can boost levels of commitment. Particularly, make sure to get in good with your partner’s family and friends, so that they encourage your partner’s commitment and investment in you. If family and friends are not supportive of your relationship or dislike you, however, they may try to undermine those plans and investments instead. Many commitments have been ruined by jealous friends or oppositional family. If you can’t win them over (and your partner doesn’t support you against their sabotage), then it may become a relationship deal breaker. In that case, you might have to end the relationship compassionately and find someone else more willing to commit instead.

© 2024 by Jeremy S. Nicholson, M.A., M.S.W., Ph.D. All rights reserved.