What rom-coms teach us about real-life relationships: a psychological study

Here’s how to write your own successful romance.

Psychologists discovered some of the biggest lessons people can learn about their love lives from romantic comedies.

Eli Finkel, a Northwestern University psychologist and author of “All or Nothing Marriage,” and Paul Eastwick, a social psychologist at the University of California at Davis who focuses on attraction and close relationships, studied helpful relationship advice from Roma classic. -com and published their findings in the new report.

“Our hope was that famous films (When Harry Met Sally, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Challengers) could serve as Trojan horses for smuggling serious ideas and scientific evidence into the public discourse about relationships,” the pair told the Society for Science Psychological. .

In the duo’s latest episode of Love Actually, they explain various lessons movies have taught them, from negative reciprocity and building intimacy to relationship essentials.

“As psychologists, we primarily study how people subjectively experience their relationships, but relationship science also extends into related social science subfields such as sociology, communication and family studies,” they said.

One of the first lessons learned was the destructive power of negative reciprocity relationships.

“I must confess that I am particularly partial to ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ having seen the movie that almost saved my relationship with my then-boyfriend (now husband),” Jessica Stillman wrote in an Inc. opinion piece “But apparently, I’m not the only one who’s had their affair [emotional intelligence] grown by this strange but touching film.”

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, negative reciprocity, a dismissive exchange that receives a disproportionate response, is seen between two characters, but is not encouraged if you want a healthy relationship dynamic.

“If I attack and then you attack and then I attack him and so on, we end up in a very significant fight, the kind of fight that predicts divorce on average,” warned relationship expert Finkel and Eastwick.

Although science proves that negative reciprocity is a recipe for disaster, according to a recent study published in Communications Psychology, walking away from the argument for five minutes can help diffuse the situation.

Another important lesson is building intimacy through mutual self-disclosure, which can help strengthen a relationship. An example of this can be seen in “Before Sunrise”, where a young traveling couple named, Jesse and Celine exchange deep questions and answers throughout the night.

This approach allows couples to ask each other a series of thought-provoking questions that gradually become more intimate, increasing their feelings of excitement and closeness.

“Where you say one thing and then I say one thing. And each of us is taking turns in terms of self-disclosure, sharing private information, personal information about ourselves. This is where you really get, on average, the deepest sense of attraction and connection to each other,” the scientists continued.

Eastwick and Finkel agree that “Before Sunrise” demonstrated the highly encouraged concept well.

“The movie just does a great job, almost like a tennis match, going back and forth who are sharing private, interesting information about themselves,” they add.

Finally, certain behaviors must be displayed in relation to emerging interests.

Eastwick and Finkel admired the relationship aspect of “La La Land,” which shows how a couple shaped each other throughout their partnership.

The men point out that people tend to have a list of qualities they look for in a partner, but that list is never matched once they find a romantic interest. Instead, the pair will adapt to each other’s preferences.

“We think we want someone who comes already pre-packaged to share our values. But it’s more useful to think about the ways partners share and shape each other,” share Eastwick and Finkel.

For example, in “La La Land,” the couple share different tastes in music. Seb is passionate about Jazz, while Mia is not. However, the more time they spend together, she eventually becomes passionate about the music genre itself. This dynamic could have been a deal breaker early in their relationship, but it ultimately backfired.

“A relationship is something that partners create together. It is not something that can be distilled based on the characteristics of the two partners – distilled into something known in advance. “For the most part, that’s what partners do,” Eastwick and Finkel said.