When It Comes to Romance,
Listen to Your Friends
Excerpt By Charnicia E. Huggins, Reuters Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - When it comes to predicting whether or not a heterosexual romantic relationship is going to last, the female partner's friends seem to be particularly astute, according to new study findings.

The couple's joint friends are often good at predicting the success of the relationship as well, researchers report.

``People often turn to their friends for social support; however, we don't always believe that relationship 'outsiders' can offer truly useful insight regarding our own relationship,'' lead study author Dr. Christopher R. Agnew of Purdue University in Indiana told Reuters Health. ``Yet our study suggests that our friends can possess a great deal of prognostic information concerning our involvements.''

To investigate, Agnew's team performed a study of 74 male-female couples and their network of friends, including both their joint friends and their individual friends. All of the participants, including the couple members, were asked to give their perceptions about the couple's relationship, rating factors such as the male's and female's commitment to each other and their closeness.

Study results show that the perceptions of the couples' joint friends and those of the female's friends were more successful in predicting the relationship's fate through the next 6 months than the perceptions of the male's friends.

Furthermore, the perceptions of the female's friends remained significant predictors of the couple's fate even when the couple members' own perceptions were taken into consideration, the investigators report in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

What's more, the female's friends' perceptions of the couple's commitment and closeness also significantly predicted whether or not the pair would break up.

The reason for this may be that couple members have a ''tremendous personal stake in the romance that clouds (their) judgments regarding it,'' the researchers suggest.

``Sometimes our very involvement in a relationship can prevent us from seeing our relationship as it is,'' Agnew said.

The female's friends, in contrast, are ``less biased'' and are therefore able to make more successful predictions, the authors explain. In addition, women, in comparison to men, are known to share more realistic and more intimate information about their relationships with their friends. Thus, her friends may have more access than his friends to the relevant information on which their relationship predictions are based, Agnew and colleagues point out.

In other findings, couples with a higher number of joint friends were more committed, satisfied and invested in the relationship, and were more likely to have remained together by the 6-month follow-up.

``Having proportionately more joint friends in your social network acts to reduce your involvement with your potentially commitment-threatening individual friends,'' Agnew explained. Individual friends ``do not necessarily even know your partner and might lead you away from your partner, either deliberately, by introducing you to tempting alternative partners, or accidentally, by putting you in an environment whereby you are tempted.''

For those with a significant number of individual friends, however, ``don't be too quick to discount the relationship assessments of your friends,'' study co-author Dr. Stephen M. Drigotas of Southern Methodist University in Texas told Reuters Health. ``They might have an accurate glimpse into what sort of relationship you have with your partner.''

SOURCE: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2001;81:1042-1057.

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