I Luv, U Suck

The more frequently women use the pronoun "I" in their instant messages (IM), the more satisfied they are with their partners, a new study finds. The guys also reported higher satisfaction in couples where the gal used "I" a lot in IMs.

While past psychological studies have analyzed couples and their communication techniques in lab settings, the new study, published in the journal Personal Relationships, relied on real-life scenarios. Instant messages are a great way to get at how people communicate in the real world.

The study analyzed 10 days of instant-message conversations from nearly 70 U.S. couples who had been dating for about one and a half years and had an average age of 19. The couples also answered questions about relationship satisfaction. Six months later, the couples indicated whether they were still dating. After six months, about 60 percent of couples were still dating while the others had broken up.

The researchers read through the conversations, noting the context of the IM threads. Then, they used a linguistic word count program to analyze the conversations' pronouns and words with emotional content. Among pronouns in IMs, couples used "I" nearly 20 times more frequently than "we." And of the emotion words, all couples were most likely to use positive words.

The extent to which people used positive emotion words like "great", "happy", "love", tended to be happier in their relationships and to stay in their relationships for a longer period of time. Women who IMed with lots of "I's" were 30 percent more likely to stay in their relationships compared with other women.

The "I"-laden instant messages could indicate women were talking about themselves and were comfortable doing so with their partners. Women tend to be more emotionally expressive in general and tend to be more disclosing in general. The findings suggest that beyond women wanting to disclose more and disclosing more in their everyday life, that when they do disclose more in their relationships, they're happier in those relationships. An alternative explanation might be that you are not so enmeshed in your relationship that you have lost yourself completely.

What's unique about this study is the way in which it captures naturally occurring discourse and discourse that's not a response to a particular type of situation. It's just everyday talk.

For women, the more they used so-called positive negations, such as "not happy," the less satisfied they and their partners were in the relationship. The more men used positive sarcasm, such as "oh great," the less satisfied they were in their relationships and the more likely that relationship would split. For both men and women, the use of negative emotions, such as "angry", wasn't related to their relationship satisfaction or stability. The question is whether using certain words when communicating with a partner leads to healthier relationships or that the most satisfied couples speak to each other with certain pronouns and emotion words.

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