Love-Hate Relationships Reflect Low Self-Esteem

If you can't decide whether your partner is a frog or a prince, the problem may be with you.

Having "love-hate relationships" with people is a sign of low self-esteem, according to a prize-winning series of studies appearing in this month's issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The findings could help couples and families in relationships in which attitudes toward loved ones swing wildly, said Yale psychologist Margaret Clark, the lead researcher in the study.

Love-hate relationships, she said, are "likely to be very disconcerting for partners. They can do a small thing, good or bad, perhaps, and produce large swings in a partner's views, and they're probably baffled as to why. It could lead to partner insecurity."

To investigate love-hate relationships, Ms. Clark and her research team asked participants to take a widely used psychological measure called the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Some time later, participants were asked to answer some structured questions about their feelings toward people they were close to -- lovers, friends or parents.

For example, participants had to pick between these two statements: "When I'm mad at my partner, I can't think of anything good about him/her." And: "Even when my partner does something to hurt me, it is easy to remind myself of his or her positive attributes."

Participants who scored low in self-esteem tended to hold more polarized opinions of their intimates, researchers found, whether of lovers, friends or parents. The subjects included married couples, engaged couples and college students.

Ms. Clark theorized that people with higher self-esteem were better at integrating positive and negative feelings about people in their minds. People with lower self-esteem, she thought, were more likely to store positive and negative feelings separately in their heads.

Lisa Daily, author of the advice book Stop Getting Dumped! (Penguin, 2002), said her experience suggested women get into love-hate relationships more often than men do.

"Women tend to define themselves more by their relationships. Men tend to define themselves more by their accomplishments," she said.

Source: The Augusta Chronicle. Powered by Yellowbrix.