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Why people make 'couple photos' their profile pictures, according to psychologists
Why we post couple photos
- Self-perception: when we're in close relationships, we tend to include our partners in our identity ( we may see them as part of ourselves).
- Self-esteem boost: displaying our relationships status makes us feel good about ourselves.
- Social protection: we tend to defend our relationships against threats posed by alternative partners and romantic rivals.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
A toxic relationship
Is any relationship between people who don’t support each other, where there’s conflict and one seeks to undermine the other, where there is competition and there is disrespect.
A toxic relationship is consistently unpleasant and draining for the people in it, to the point that negative moments outweigh and outnumber the positive ones.
What makes a relationship toxic
People who consistently undermine or cause harm to a partner (whether intentionally or not) often have a reason for their behavior, even if it’s subconscious.
Maybe they were in a toxic relationship, either romantically or as a child. Maybe they didn’t have the most supportive, loving upbringing. They could have been bullied in school. They could be suffering from an undiagnosed mental health disorder.
Warning signs
The most serious warning signs include any form of violence, abuse or harassment, which should be dealt with immediately. But in many cases, the indicators of a toxic relationship are much more subtle: Persistent unhappiness, negative shifts in your mental health, personality or self-esteem, feeling like you can’t talk with or voice concerns to your significant other.
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Key Ideas
Online dating apps
Lots of dating apps and websites claim to be able to use data to sort through profiles for better matches. But scientists and journalists can't investigate their claims, as the algorithms are the intellectual property of these companies and not publicly available.
This encouraged scientists to make their own app and examine predictors of attraction.
Predicting romantic desire
The things that are needed to be able to predict romantic desire.
- Actor desire. How choosy people are.
- Partner desire or average attractiveness.
- Compatibility: Researchers measured compatibility by subtracting choosiness and attractiveness from dater's scores of romantic interest.
Compatibility prediction
To account for research failure, it is believed that when two people actually meet, they form a shared dynamic that is more than the sum of its parts. Their individual preferences do not make up the substance of what they would find attractive.
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Key Ideas
Rekindling Of An Old Flame
Breakups and subsequent renewals are quite common across all types of romantic relationships and even marriages.
Falling apart and then seeking to mend the old relationship seems to be deeply rooted in our psychology.
The Protest Phase
When people experience breakups they go through the ‘protest’ phase initially, and the rejected lover becomes obsessed with winning back the person who has quit the relationship.
Rejection, paradoxically, makes the rejected person love the partner even more. This is called a ‘Frustration Attraction’, and can be categorized as an addiction.
Chemical Reactions
The rejected lover experiences high levels of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, and are visibly stressed out. These chemical reactions trigger many to do crazy things to win their ex back. Such feelings are erased quickly if the lover starts dating a new partner.
Some people also feel increasingly passionate and loving after the breakup and are more likely to forgive their ex.