‘We-talk’ – constantly referring to yourself and your partner in the plural – is annoying. But it is also a sign that your relationship is solid. What else has science got to teach us about staying together?
It’s always we, we, we … have you noticed? We all know people who seem to have lost the capacity to talk about themselves as autonomous individuals the moment they couple up. “We’re doing well, thanks”; “We love spaghetti”; “We are thinking about buying an emotional support squirrel.”
Irritatingly, it turns out that these people are not just semantically smug – they’re joyful. A study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside found that “we-talk”, as they term it, is associated with happier and healthier relationships. To quote the undecipherable academese seemingly beloved by social scientists trying to justify the fact they have spent months studying we-ing, they found “meta-analytic evidence that we-talk predicts relationship and personal functioning in romantic couples”. The study also found that hearing your partner use “we” frequently is more strongly linked to happiness than using we-talk yourself.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2yCcFRc
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