Can Real Relationships Survive Romance?

Whether you pluck up your courage to ask someone out on a first date or make the ultimate romantic gesture by proposing to your true love, Valentine's Day is the perfect occasion to show someone how much you care. Or so it seems.

"The wealth of magazine articles and self-help books giving advice on relationships shows that many people find relationships to be a challenge," says Diane Holmberg, a psychology professor at Acadia University.

We see images of relationships everywhere, both in our personal lives and in the media. We form our own relationship scripts based on these powerful images.

"Things were happening too fast" and "She kept trying to slow the relationship down" are typical descriptions of problems in romantic relationships. According to Holmberg, these descriptions suggest that people are comparing their relationships to what she calls internal relationship scripts or "mental models of what should be happening in a relationship, and in what order."

"Portrayals of romantic relationships in popular culture may or may not be accurate. But they can communicate information about how romantic relationships can and should progress, even to those who have never been in a romantic relationship themselves," she explains.

Holmberg's research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), involved asking couples about their past relationships, what they envisioned for themselves in the future, and their images of ideal dating and married relationships.

Holmberg notes that the couples who were dating had beliefs about marriage that differ considerably from those of the couples who were married.

"The participants' marriages were not quite like their idealized vision of marriage, but they seemed to be okay with that. Perhaps they understood through experience that no marriage is perfect. Our dating participants were much more optimistic, typically believing that the reality of their future marriage would be quite close to their ideal image of it."

Holmberg interviewed the participants a second time one year after the first interview in order to find out whether their ideas-and their relationships-had changed. She found that partners' scripts had converged somewhat over time, and that those couples who shared a similar view of their relationship were more satisfied than those who did not.

"Sharing a common sense of where you've been and where you expect to go in the future bodes well for the relationship," says Holmberg.

So be careful not to get your hopes up too high this Valentine's Day. As Holmberg puts it, "Valentine's Day might encourage idealized visions of relationships that are not necessarily bad in the short term, but may not work for the long haul."

You can learn about other SSHRC-funded research on the Council's Web site ( www.sshrc.ca ).

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