New research suggests that couples experience some of the same attachment issues as a mother and child. Anyone who has been in a romantic relationship and felt any kind of emotional distress during a long separation from a loved one knows this experience.From the Psychology Today blog The Attractionologists:
Separation Distress Among Romantic Partners and its Lessons for Human Mating
When I was 11 years old, I remember my stepmother describing to me how she broke down one day while traveling abroad in China. She was away from home and away from my father for 5 weeks, and at the time of one of their scheduled phone calls, she couldn't find a way to connect to the United States. At the time, I remember thinking, "wait, seriously?" My Dad's a terrific guy, don't get me wrong, but wasn't this a bit of an overreaction?
Fast forward 15 years, and I'm on a trip with my father and stepmother. A cruise, actually. At this point, I had been dating my girlfriend for about 18 months - not exactly marriage, but not exactly a fledgling relationship either. So what did I do when the ship arrived in Civitavecchia, a rather nondescript port town on the Western coast of Italy? Did I hop on a bus to Rome and see the Coliseum? Did I visit the Spanish Steps or the Vatican?
Hardly - instead, I spent approximately 4 hours tracking down a phone card, the holy grail that had been eluding me since I left and had become my single obsession. Finally, after being away from home for a mere week, I could finally forgo all the excitement and adventure of being in Europe and burn through the full 90-minute phone card talking to my girlfriend (now fiancée).
For people not currently involved in a romantic relationship, it all probably sounds rather lame, if not downright nauseating. But at long last, I have been vindicated by an article in this month's issue of the scholarly periodical Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. As it turns out, my experience was hardly unique and says a great deal about the workings of the human mating psychology.
In this article, Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah and her colleagues Angela Hicks and Kimberly Otter-Henderson report on a study of couples who were separated for 4-7 days from their romantic partners. The scholars hypothesized that these separations would be associated with a variety of negative outcomes, and this was indeed what they found.
For example, the participants tended to report more emotional distress when the separation began, but this distress subsided again once they were reunited. Both partners reported difficulty sleeping when separated. And to the extent that the participants were anxious about their relationships in general, their emotional outcomes were considerably worse; they even showed significant increases in the stress hormone cortisol during the separation periods. In fact, only a long phone conversation-not a bonanza of emails, texts, or voice messages-was effective at ameliorating these participants' negative experiences brought on by the separation.
These findings will no doubt sound intuitive to many people, and so we must be careful not to overlook what this study tells us about human beings and how they mate. These findings only make sense if we take seriously one simple idea: that romantic partners become attached to one another, much in the same way that infants attach to caregivers. We become so attached that separations may literally cause our bodies to start to give out from under us.
Our tendency to attach to our romantic partners is a central and vital component of the human mating psychology that often goes underappreciated. It is not as exciting as some other human mating behaviors that make for scandalous headlines, but it is surely relevant to the emotional well being of countless Holiday Inn patrons who will be dining alone tonight at Bennigan's. And for every solo traveler who might decide to take the opportunity abroad to have a short-term sexual dalliance, countless others are desperately scouring the Italian countryside for a phone card or pleading with a Chinese operator to accept a credit card.
(This post was co-authored with Eli Finkel.)
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