Should You Have a Blind Spot for a Partner's Flaws?

In a committed relationship, couples have decided to stick together even though the relationship, or the partner, may not be without its imperfections. Perhaps you and your partner have been together long enough to be aware of many of these imperfections. However, are there times when you worry that there’s something you’ve missed about your partner that deserves your attention? Your partner, for example, may be generous but to a fault, leading them to be a soft touch when relatives or friends ask for a loan. It’s great that your partner is so concerned about the well-being of people in need of support but, on the other hand, your budget may not be able to withstand these good intentions.

It can be difficult to disentangle your perceptions of your partner from the love and attraction you feel toward them. Indeed, the longer you’re together, the more your perception of your partner can start to blend into your perception of yourself. Long-term committed relationships involve the overlapping of individual identities to the point that many of the self-other boundaries disappear. At that point, you may feel as strong a need to see your partner to be as virtuous as you see yourself. There’s considerable evidence in psychology that most non-depressed people tend to have a positive if not self-serving bias in evaluating their own behavior. The more your identity merges with your partner, the more that bias can come to interfere with your accurate judgement of their behavior.

Relational Connectivity and the Merging of Identities

According to University of Alberta’s Adam Galovan and colleagues (2021), the state of “relational connectivity” begins to emerge as couples establish a connection with “the very Psyche of the other.” Citing their earlier work, the authors define this sense of intimacy as ‘a multidimensional construct of couple connectedness.’” Its three key elements are "mutual friendship, intimacy and belongingness.”

This all sounds great, but does a high sense of relational connectivity have any bearing on your satisfaction with your partner? And is it preferable to have that relational connectivity, blind spots and all, rather than a more reality-based conception of your partner? Isn’t it better, furthermore, to focus on the processes that can maintain relationship satisfaction, such as the ability to communicate rather than on some amorphous sense of identity blending?

As the Canadian authors point out, there does seem to be a difference between satisfaction and connectivity, making the two not necessarily equitable in terms of understanding the essence of a good relationship. The standard relationship satisfaction-communication model, they propose provides a “thin” understanding of a couple’s partnership, meaning that it only skims the surface. Comparing relationship satisfaction research to more general life satisfaction research, Galovan et al. note that people may say they’re satisfied with their lives but not feel that their life provides meaning. Couples who communicate well may lack the “deep” bond that weaves their identities together and as a result, never really experience a more profound feeling that they are working toward similar life goals.

Testing the Relational Connectivity Model

If it’s true that relational connectivity and satisfaction signify different levels of intimacy, then there need to be different metrics for evaluating partners' bonds with each other than the typical measures used in most couples research. The research team tested this proposal on an international sample of 615 couples averaging 46 years old (ranging from 18-89), most of whom (84%) were in heterosexual relationships, and averaging 19 years together.

To measure relationship satisfaction in the traditional sense, the authors used a 4-item questionnaire with 6-point ratings of items such as “In general, how satisfied are you with your relationship?” To tap relational connectivity, defined as involving sense of belonging, friendship, and intimacy, the authors turned to adapting items from several existing measures that they thought would fit the bill. Examples of these items are “I feel loved and cared for in this relationship,” “My partner and I share many positive memories,” and “To what extent do you feel you and your partner are one?” As you can see already from the items themselves, there is indeed a difference between that “thin” satisfaction measure and the deeper ones requiring you to have to think about your relationship as a communal, shared experience.

A variety of other relationship measures made it possible for the authors to contrast these two conceptually different aspects of a couple’s functioning in areas such as conflict resolution, ambivalence, and “maintenance,” or the ability to meet the partner's needs. Another measure asked partners to rate each other on such virtues as optimism, compassion, and humility. Capturing that contrast between life satisfaction and life meaning, the research team also administered measures asking individuals to rate their own happiness and sense of purpose.

Turning to the findings, the authors used the connectivity and satisfaction measures to categorize couples according to combinations of high and low scores yielding four categories:

Flourishing: high on both satisfaction and connectivity

Languishing: low on both satisfaction and connectivity

Connected, less satisfied: high on connectivity but low on satisfaction

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Satisfied, less connected: low on connectivity but high on satisfaction

You might stop at this point and ask yourself how you think you would score if you were in these varying groups. If you’re lucky enough to be in the flourishing quadrant, based on the study sample’s data, you would also be likely to score higher on all of the measures used in the study, including several tapping into individual symptoms of depression. Conversely, as you might also imagine, couples in the languishing category scored the lowest on the study’s outcome measures. Now, try placing yourself in the two contrasting connectivity-satisfaction categories. What would it mean for your relationship’s health to have connectivity even if you didn’t rate high on satisfaction?

As it turned out, consistent with the Galovan et al. research team’s predictions, those in the high connectivity low satisfaction group indeed scored higher on a range of other measures including stronger commitment to the relationship, more focus on the partner than the self, increased time together in meaningful activities, less ambiguity about the relationship, and a greater tendency to see the partner as virtuous.

Why a Blind Spot Might Benefit Your Relationship

Looking at this last set of findings, you can see that couples who felt that their identities were merged in a healthy and strongly connected fashion also tended to see their partners in a more positive light. The highly connected, rightly or wrongly, had high estimates of their partners as virtuous individuals. It was true in general that the more highly connected were also more satisfied, but teasing those factors apart, the authors were able to establish this key distinction in the underlying framework of a couples’ relationship.

As in research on individual satisfaction and sense of meaning in life, the results from the study shed light on the problem involved in the “'paradox of pursing happiness.’” If you go into your relationship determined to have it become a source of happiness or satisfaction your ability to establish deep bonds with your partner might fall by the wayside. The desire to have a happy relationship, as the authors note, “leads to a strange situation where marriage is both more valued and more fragile than ever before.”

By looking critically at your partner and evaluating whether each aspect of their behavior is “satisfactory,” you can fall prey to this no-win approach. Instead, turning that blind eye will allow your partner’s flaws to escape detection in the same way yours do when you apply the self-serving bias to your own behavior. Returning to the case of your overly generous partner, barring any actual threats to the financial health of your relationship, perhaps it’s just as well to reframe the behavior as just another instance of the kind of virtues you would like to see in yourself.

To sum up, being able to gloss over some of your partner’s imperfections as you focus on deeper issues relating to shared identity and mutuality may be what your relationship needs to move from languishing into flourishing as you navigate the years and decades ahead.

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