I’m not going to lie to you. Although I now preach from the high heavens that all types of relationships are equally important and that we focus entirely too much of our energy on romance, when I first started studying relationships and conducting my own humble amateur research, it was romantic relationships that interested me.
My marriage fell apart at the end of 2020. We had been married for 10 years. I was 36 years old and I had spent a third of my life with my husband. We have 3 children together. We were living in a foreign country when our relationship collapsed and had to endure spending 8 months together under the same roof. It was rough and painful. Now, in 2023, our relationship is still strained. Our relationship is not at all sustainable, so believe me, I know an unsustainable relationship when I see one. I hope we will reach a point of sustainability one day.
It was this hardship that got me curious about relationships. It made me reflect on the course of my romantic life and retrace the stages of my life in my mind culminating in the end of my marriage. I realized I had definitely made some mistakes, especially in my approach to dating.
Many people come to their romantic explorations armed with a list of qualities they desire. They have requirements. Sometimes the requirements are physical — attractiveness, height, body type, etc. People often also consider factors like level of education, income, occupation, shared hobbies, etc. I’m sure these all sound like reasonable things to consider when dating. You probably have some requirements yourself.
Requirements are based on desirability. A lot of information is collected from you when you use a dating app. When researchers get a hold of that data, it’s quite easy to see what people are looking for in a romantic partner. Desirability is easily measured and predicted.
A huge study about this was done by a researcher named Samantha Joel. Her research concluded that desirability is a poor predictor of relationship success. Simply put: it’s easy to predict desirability, but it’s very hard to predict compatibility.
Romantic love is certainly about more than just procreating and ensuring the presence of our genes in the next generation. Romantic love is a complex collection of feelings that we can feel to varying degrees. We each have many distinctive experiences that influence us, impact us, and change our paths in life. Through these experiences, we each come to make sense of the world through the lens of our own unique perspectives. We develop values & norms, beliefs, attitudes, and personality traits that make us who we are. Finding alignment in these areas is the key to compatibility. Compatibility is the foundation of sustainable romantic relationships.
Some of our highest-frequency relationships are romantic. If you decide to cohabitate with a romantic partner, the frequency with which you interact with that person will be rivaled only by how much time you spend with yourself. If you decide to have children with a romantic partner, you are committing to having that person in your life in some capacity for as long as you live. When two people find compatibility with one another, they are able to coexist joyfully, resolve conflict peacefully, and complement each other in important ways. Compatibility is a huge asset when it comes to building sustainable romantic relationships.
[Side note: not all romantic relationships are monogamous. This will definitely be discussed in future posts. The information and opinions I’m presenting here apply to all romantic relationships, both monogamous and non-monogamous.]
Value Alignment
There is so much to be explored here. This is the first of many posts about this topic. In this first part, I’m going to introduce the foundation of my ideas.
Theory of Basic Human Values
Before I can really get into my postulates of Value Alignment, I have to introduce you to the Theory of Basic Human Values proposed by Shalom H. Schwartz.
According to Schwartz, values are subjective beliefs that motivate our actions toward specific goals. They transcend specific situations, serving as evaluative standards, and guiding an individual’s actions. An individual’s values are in response to three universal requirements of human existence — biological needs, agreement on social actions, and the survival/wellbeing of groups. To measure values, individuals order them according to relative importance. This ordering reveals which values are prioritized and desired for a particular individual.
According to Schwartz, there are ten different types of values that serve different goals for humans. They are:
Self direction: the goals are independent thought and action, autonomy, independence.
Stimulation: the goals are excitement, challenge in life, variety, and novelty.
Hedonism: the goals are pleasure, enjoying life, sensuous gratification.
Achievement: the goal is personal success as demonstrated by societal standards as well as obtaining social approval.
Power: the goals are social status, prestige, control and dominance over others.
Security: the goals are harmony, stability of society/relationships/self.
Conformity: the goals are obedience and self-discipline in an effort to fit into social expectations.
Tradition: the goals are respect and commitment to customs, and possibly religion.
Benevolence: the goals are preserving and helping the welfare of people with whom we interact frequently.
Universalism: the goals are understanding, appreciating, tolerating, and protecting the welfare of all people and nature.
There is some overlap within these categories. For example: conformity and tradition are different values but they are motivated by the same drive — to subordinate oneself to social expectations. Additionally, both conformity and benevolence are motivated by the drive to be cooperative and supportive in social relations with people close to us.
Conversely, some values are in direct opposition to one another. For example: pursuing goals related to stimulation values is likely to undermine and contradict pursuing tradition values, since stimulation focuses on novelty and newness while tradition is more concerned with time-honored customs and keeping the status quo. Achievement values are often in opposition to benevolence values since success for oneself can interfere with the welfare of others. This demonstrates that actions in pursuit of a value may conflict with or agree with another value.
These ten types of values can be classified into four distinct categories: openness to change, self-enhancement, self-transcendence, and conservation. The way the ten values are classified is as follows:
Openness to change includes: self-direction, stimulation, and hedonism.
Self-enhancement includes: power, achievement, and hedonism.
Self-transcendence includes: benevolence and universalism.
Conservation includes: conformity, tradition, and security.
Openness to change and conservation are directly oppositional. Openness to change emphasizes independence, autonomy, pleasure, and novelty. Conservation emphasizes keeping the status quo, self-restriction, and resistance to change.
Self-enhancement and self-transcendence are also directly oppositional. Benevolence and universalism prioritize the welfare of others while achievement and power prioritize the welfare and success of oneself over others.
The closer two values are to each other on the diagram above, the more similar their motivations. Values that are opposite each other on the circle are conflicting in their motivations. Tradition and conformity are motivationally the same.
Schwartz also devised a system for measuring people’s values. In the assessment, people rank which values are most important to them. Value items, which are words that are related to the values, are evaluated and ordered. The result of this inventory is an individual’s priority list of values.
The majority of research shows that values are generally stable over time, meaning that even if other aspects of your life change over the course of your lifetime, the values you assign the greatest importance often remain the same.
So what does this have to do with relationships?
When priorities of values are congruent, there is natural alignment between two people. When two people rank the same values or values that are close together on the circle similarly, there can be feelings of comfort and resonance in their conversations and interactions, even if they differ in other ways such as their beliefs, likes and dislikes, or personality traits.
Deep, meaningful relationships are not based on having hobbies or favorite foods in common. These details are fun and exciting to discover early in a relationship, but they are not what sustain the relationship. When conflict inevitably arises, a shared love of coffee is not going to be the resolution. Not all conflict is harmful to a relationship. Some conflicts are easier to overcome than others. Conflicts that are not easy to resolve and often damage a relationship arise because of value priorities that are too different from one another.
Our underlying values allow us to connect deeply with one another. Having the language to describe these values helps us identify them so we can understand our own better and recognize alignment when we see it in our relationships.
Norms
Let’s briefly discuss social norms and what they are. Differences in the roles that social norms play in two people’s lives can be dealbreakers in a relationship.
Norms are standards and rules that tell people and society how they should behave. An individual’s acceptance of norms can vary depending on how much a person agrees or disagrees that people should behave a certain way. The norms that people adopt and obey or reject are derived directly from the values they prioritize. Norms require that people behave a certain way and there are specific consequences if those norms are disregarded. Whether the consequences agree or conflict with one’s values is what determines acceptance or rejection of a particular norm.
While values are general and idealistic, norms are concrete and refer to specific acts. The norms that people hold dear, obey, or reject are inextricably tied to the values they prioritize.
A person who ranks conformity and tradition highly will be much more likely to obey societal norms than one who ranks stimulation and hedonism. Rejection of social norms can be distressing for people who treasure and respect them. Someone who prioritizes universalism is much more likely to obey and protect norms that encourage people to care for the environment whereas a person who prioritizes power would be less concerned with such a norm. I will further discuss how norms affect our relationships in a future post.
What does it all mean?
I am suggesting that if two people who desire to explore a romantic connection with each other discuss and assess their personal values and norms early in the relationship, they can determine whether they are aligned and how to proceed with that information. While values and norms are the most important, other factors also contribute to feelings of relationship alignment such as congruence about beliefs, attitudes, and, to a lesser extent, personality traits.
I want us to revisit the circular diagram from earlier in the post. Here it is again, slightly edited:
If a person prioritizes openness to change and self-transcendence values, they should seek relationships with people, groups, and organizations that also prioritize those. One who prioritizes those values should not seek relationships with people, groups, or organizations that prioritize self-enhancement and conservation values. People who prioritize these distinct groups are distinct groups themselves. Those who focus on self-enhancement and conservation are dedicated to the status quo, maintaining social order and norms, and pursuing activities that increase their social status. On the other hand, folks who focus on openness to change and self-transcendence are more likely to disrupt social order, reject norms, and pursue activities that focus more on collectivism.
In romantic relationships, the opposing values of self-direction and security can present specific problems. Security is adjacent to power on the circle due to shared underlying motivation. Both of these values are rooted in avoiding or overcoming threats by controlling relationships and resources. Self-direction is adjacent to universalism. Their shared motivation is rooted in being comfortable with diversity of existence.
Example: Person A, who is pursuing acts related to security in their relationship, is more inclined to make demands on Person B and have a desire to control their actions whereas Person B, who is pursuing self-direction, is more interested in maintaining independence, freedom, and autonomy for self and for Person A. This is a clear contradiction that will lead to conflict. For example: when Person A wants Person B to make agreements that restrict their ability to choose. By the same token, the relationship with Person B will likely not live up to the expectations of stability that Person A has.
When people have different values, they choose to honor or reject different norms. Someone who vehemently honors and defends the norm, “One’s family should come before everything else” is likely to rank tradition and conformity highly, while stimulation is low on their list of priorities. If someone does not honor this norm, it can be a dealbreaker for a person who does. The foundation of this dealbreaker is a difference in accepted norms and a polar difference in values according to the diagram.
A person who ranks conservation values highly is probably more interested in marriage than one who prioritizes openness to change values. Couple high conservation with high self-enhancement and the person is even more likely to desire marriage since a happy marriage is traditional and perceived as an achievement by societal norms.
While values generally remain stable over time, they can change in response to cultural influences, socialization, life experience, and changes in roles so, in a relationship, it is imperative to periodically check in to discuss values, especially during times of major transition and change.
Whew!
If you’re still with me, thank you for making it this far. This was a lot, wasn’t it? And there is still so much more to say about this. In Part 2 of this overview, I will go even deeper into my analysis, giving you more insight into my thoughts about Value Alignment.