If you or your partner do this one thing, researchers say your relationship is doomed

If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, “Fine, I’ll do the dishes, but they’d better do the school pickup,” psychologists have a name for it: social exchange theory or exchange orientation. And while it may feel like a normal ‘fairness’ reaction, it’s not great for your relationship.

It’s described as the reflex to expect a direct payback for every favor, but according to a recent study, it’s poison for long-term happiness.

Avoiding the tit-for-tat requirement

Published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the research followed 7,293 romantic couples in Germany over 13 years. Using advanced statistical models to separate who people are on average from how they change over time, the team found a clear pattern: partners who held onto a tit-for-tat mindset saw steeper declines in relationship satisfaction. When people became more of a score-keeper than usual for them, their satisfaction reliably dropped later on. Crucially, the reverse wasn’t true, lower satisfaction didn’t foreshadow more score-keeping.

The authors – Haeyoung Gideon Park (University of Toronto), Matthew D. Johnson (University of Alberta), Amie M. Gordon (University of Michigan) and Emily A. Impett (University of Toronto Mississauga) – grounded their work in pairfam, the German Family Panel, a nationally representative study that has tracked partnership and family dynamics since 2008. That infrastructure let them test long-term trajectories rather than one-off snapshots, key for understanding how relationships actually evolve.

What does the study show?

Two findings stand out. First, exchange orientation tends to decline as relationships mature i.e. we usually become less transactional with time. But when that decline is slower, satisfaction falls faster.

Second, matching mindsets doesn’t help. The researchers searched for “similarity effects” – the idea that two equally score-keeping partners might be fine because they agree on the rules. They found this wasn’t the case. In fact, it added to the issue: the more either partner kept score, the worse both felt.

The study also took open-science steps unusual in relationship research, including a preregistered analysis plan hosted on the Open Science Framework. That preregistration strengthens confidence that the core tests weren’t tailored after the fact.

What does this mean for real life?

Psychologists often contrast exchange relationships (“I help you so you’ll help me”) with communal ones (“I help you because I care”). This paper suggests that nudging a partnership toward the communal end – even in small, repeated ways – pays off over years.

The practical move for everyone is simple to describe but can be hard to do: stop tallying. If you’re keeping mental receipts, treat that as a red flag to reset expectations, talk openly about needs, and design routines that feel fair without requiring immediate repayment. If you find this impossible, you may need to reassess who you’re with.

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