The Number One Reason People Find It Hard to Be Affectionate

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Expressing affection and gratitude for your partner not only increases your relationship satisfaction, but also strengthens your partner’s commitment, and their appreciation for you. But if the benefits of affection and gratitude are so great, why do so many of us find it difficult to thank our partners? And why do we sometimes resist showing affection if it would strengthen our relationships?

A team of psychologists from New York and California recently tackled this question. They wondered if people in relationships are driven by two opposing goals—to develop a satisfying relationship and minimize the risk of rejection. Behaviors that support one goal could undermine the other: For example, expressing affection can have positive outcomes, but if our affection is not returned we may feel rejected. What’s more, some people are more concerned about the risk of rejection than others. For people with low self-esteem, expressing affection may induce feelings of vulnerability. To minimize the risk of rejection, it can sometimes feel safer to withhold affection and gratitude entirely—to pursue the goal of minimizing rejection to the detriment of developing a satisfying relationship.

Speaking/Listening

Anna Luerssen and her team invited 60 couples to their laboratory. Each person was separated from their partner to receive instructions about the experiment. One partner was given the role of “speaker” His or her task was to offer their partner three compliments. The other partner was the “listener”: He or she was told that their partner had been given a list of topics to speak about and had chosen “things about my partner I really like.” The listener would listen to the speaker and not offer any verbal response. Of course, the speaker had not really chosen to compliment his/her partner: The researchers said this so that the listeners would think the compliments were spontaneous.

After their interaction, both partners completed questionnaires about how the activity made them feel. They also spat into a test tube so that the researchers could test their hormone levels. Finally, the speaker completed a self-esteem questionnaire.

Progesterone Boost

Luerssen and her colleagues found that speakers with lower self-esteem offered less affectionate compliments and thought the task was more difficult and uncomfortable. Previous research has shown that affection can increase our levels of the hormone progesterone, but speakers with low self-esteem did not experience this boost.

However, listeners whose partners were low in self-esteem reacted just as positively to the compliments as did listeners whose partners were high in self-esteem. In fact, the progesterone boosts experienced by listeners with a partner low in self-esteem were slightly higher.

The researchers reported, "Participants with lower [self-esteem] were less inclined to believe that their partners experienced emotional benefits from their affection, suggesting that their perceptions are inaccurate and biased."

In other words, people with low self-esteem are more motivated by the goal of minimizing rejection than developing a satisfying relationship. They may avoid expressing affection and gratitude because they are worried about their partner’s negative reactions. But the research suggests that they are misguided: Everyone benefits when we tell our partners how much we cherish them.

If you liked this, you might enjoy my podcast: The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.