Penning romantic sonnets and preparing candlelit dinners have their place in the pantheon of grand romantic gestures, but if you’re serious about building a blissful life together, start with beans – spilling them, to be precise.
That is according to new research from the University of California, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. It suggests the ancient art of exchanging hot gossip may be one secret ingredient in successful relationships, predicting both happiness and bonding between couples.
The research team assessed 76 same-gender and different-gender romantic Southern California couples. Participants wore a portable listening device that sampled what they said throughout the day, with about 14 per cent of their daily conversation recorded and analysed by research assistants.
The recordings revealed participants spent about 38 minutes per day gossiping, with about 29 of those minutes gossiping with their romantic partners.
“Whether or not we want to admit it, everyone gossips,” said Chandler Spahr, first author of the research, which the team said is the first to examine the dynamics of gossip and wellbeing within romantic partnerships. “Gossip is ubiquitous.”
Couples’ gossip “is strongly and reliably related to happiness”, the authors said, and they found that a juicy goss sesh is also related – albeit to a lesser extent – to relationship quality.
The authors suggested that gossiping between partners may serve as a form of emotional bonding. To illustrate this, they ask us to consider a driving-home-from-a-party scenario.
“What do you do in the car?” asked Megan Robbins, a UCR psychology professor and the paper’s senior author. “You talk about everybody at the party. Who said what? What’s going on with their relationship?
“Didn’t Veronica look great? Didn’t Joe look awful? Did you sense tension between them?”
This may play a vital role in strengthening relationships, the authors contend, because “negatively gossiping with one’s romantic partner on the way home from a party could signal that the couple’s bond is stronger than with their friends at the party, while positively gossiping could prolong the fun experiences”, they said.
“It may reinforce the perception that partners are ‘on the same team’, enhancing feelings of connectedness, trust, and other positive relationship qualities, as well as contributing to overall wellbeing.”
The authors said gossip may also function as a “social regulation tool”, helping to establish expectations and behaviours that contribute to a harmonious relationship.
The research is a follow-up to a 2019 paper that dispelled some long-held gossip myths. That study found women don’t engage in negative gossip more than men, and lower-income people don’t gossip any more than wealthy people. It also found that younger people engage in more negative gossip than older adults.
So the next time you and your partner are discussing the scandalous details of your friends’ lives, just remember you are doing good service to your own relationship – the couple that gossips together, thrives together.
