Relationships
'Needing Your Space' Spells Doom for a Couple. Or Does It?
Relationships aren't necessarily all-or-nothing, research finds.
Posted December 8, 2015
Check out any relationship self-help or advice column. Chances are that you’ll be told how to make yours closer than it is. We’ve all been conditioned to believe that if we’re to be happy, we have to be as intensely involved with our partner as possible. When you’re not, it means that there’s something wrong with you—or your relationship.
Yet we also know that people have individual needs outside the relationship that they seek to fulfill. Following the path in life that allows you to best express your identity may mean that you have to sacrifice time with your partner. Either you have to travel away from home or spend precious evenings out, when you could be together, taking night classes or going bowling with your friends instead. Your partner may or may not understand that your wish to spend time in these other pursuits has nothing to do with your feelings about the relationship.
Alternatively, you may feel resentful and jealous of the time your partner decides to use to pursue their outside paths. Perhaps your partner is an active volunteer with a group that requires a weekend a month of service. Perhaps he or she has children who live in another town, and needs to take vacation time to spend time with them.
Regardless of how you and your partner divide your time, it’s also possible that one or both of you just prefer being able to meet your own individual needs. There’s a little escape hatch you like to have available—even if you don’t use it, you like knowing it’s there.
Researchers who study close relationships tend to focus on the factors that predict relationship satisfaction based on the assumption that more is better. However, Birk Hagemeyer of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (Germany) and colleagues (2015) were particularly interested in the phenomenon known as living-apart-together (LAT), in which couples in an intimate relationship choose to live in their own separate residences. Such an arrangement would seem to constitute a declaration by the couple that either they’re not ready to move in together (but will eventually do so) or that they will never move in together. As Hagemeyer and colleagues point out:
“Couples’ living arrangements provide an interesting context for the study of ... relationship functioning, because they constitute differential relationship conditions that foster or hinder objective closeness” (p. 814).
Let's break this down further: You can think of a couple’s decision regarding its choice of living conditions as a behavioral reflection of their particular brand of intimacy. Perhaps you know a married couple who decide to spend six months a year living in different places; maybe one rents a seaside cabin while the other remains in their shared home. Conversely, you probably know plenty of people who aren’t married but who cohabit.
What differentiates these couples, and who’s to say that one is closer (or better, or happier) than another?
The Hagemeyer team decided to compare coresident couples (COR) with LAT couples on so-called agency motives, or the desire to separate from others and focus on the individual self.
There are three components to agency motives: self-protection, self-assertion, and self-expansion. People with strong agency motives will try to seek independent experiences to “confirm the self as an independent and capable individual” (p. 815). They’ll be happiest in their relationships if they can do this (even though their partners may feel deserted) but frustrated and constrained if they’re forced into too much relationship closeness.
We might expect, then, that people high in agency would more likely choose LAT relationships than people low in the desire for individual autonomy. Further, if these high-agency people feel constrained and are COR, they should feel more dissatisfied. This basic model became the framework of a series of studies conducted by the German team on 548 heterosexual couples ranging from ages 18 to 73. All were followed over a one-year period. About 60% were COR and 40% LAT. The couples' time together ranged from one month to 53 years.
To measure relationship agency—that is, the desire to pursue activities separate from the partner—Hagemeyer and colleagues used a kind of projective test in which participants told a story about an ambiguous situation involving a couple. Raters counted the number of statements that would suggest a high need for agency, such as pursuing individual interests, getting involved in social activities without the partner, and fear of being too dependent on the partner. They also asked individuals to complete a questionnaire in which they rated their preferences to be alone as well as their desire to avoid being alone. Of greatest interest to the researchers was whether people sought agency in terms of their relationship, as opposed their lives in general.
The general findings from this unusual—and well-conducted—study supported the hypothesis that people high in agency motives, particularly those past the age of having children, were more likely to be in LAT relationships. Second, for men in particular, being high in agency while in a COR relationship predicted greater relationship conflict and lower relationship satisfaction. COR couples were happier in their relationship and had fewer conflicts—but if the male partner had high agency motives, these benefits disappeared.
To sum up: It appears that some people need their space more than others—and those people appear more likely to be male. The findings thus may conform to gender stereotypes of a man tied to his home by his partner’s apron strings. We don’t know if men with high needs for independence have grown up with the expectation that they’ll feel tied down, or whether there is a true gender difference that goes beyond socialization. Women high in agency, particularly as gauged from the questionnaire, were less likely to experience conflict if they were in an LAT relationship.
Rather than looking at relationship closeness as an all-or-nothing equation, the Hegemeyer study shows that fulfillment in a close relationship depends on maintaining the feeling that you can fill your needs, whatever they are. Relationships inevitably involve some form of compromise. Acceding to your partner’s desire for some freedom may be just the type of compromise that will add fulfillment to yours.
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Reference
Hagemeyer, B., Schönbrodt, F. D., Neyer, F. J., Neberich, W., & Asendorpf, J. B. (2015). When 'together' means 'too close': Agency motives and relationship functioning in coresident and living-apart-together couples. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 109(5), 813-835. doi:10.1037/pspi0000031
Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2015
