How "We-Talk” Could Be Used As A Predictor Of

Long-Term Relationship Satisfaction

You may not even be conscious of this simple linguistic change, but
research shows it could help keep you happy in your relationship.

LAURA SIMMONS
Editor and Staff Writer

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 Well, they do say there's no "I" in "team". Image credit: Denis Beklarov/Shutterstock.com

As Michael Jackson once famously sang: “I used to say ‘I’ and ‘me’/Now it's ‘us’, now it's
‘we’.” Yes, we know he was singing about a rat – but, if you find yourself making this
same linguistic choice when talking about your significant other, it could be a sign that
your relationship is on the up and up.
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A team of researchers at Concordia University, Quebec, undertook a longitudinal study to

test the hypothesis that “we-talk” – the use of first-person plural pronouns like “us” and
“we” – would be associated with greater marital harmony. The authors thought that there
could be a benefit associated with thinking of oneself and one’s spouse as a team,
demonstrated by a tendency towards the use of plural pronouns.

“The use of 'we' by spouses may highlight a shared identity, or 'we-ness,' rather than a
separate or individualistic construal of the self within a romantic relationship,” wrote the
team in their paper.

The study included 77 heterosexual couples, and there were some stipulations: all
couples had to be cohabiting, as well as being legal guardians to a child under the age of
7. The study was conducted bilingually, in either English or French according to the
preferences of each couple.

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Each spouse took turns in leading a short discussion while an experimenter watched on
from another room, centered around the experience of raising their child with their
partner. This topic was chosen because raising a child is a “shared stressor”, something
that affects both partners and is associated with increased conflict within a relationship.
The spouse not leading the discussion was instructed to “interact with their partner in
whatever way they wanted.” 

Before the discussions, =then at six and 12 months later, the couples were asked to
complete a marital satisfaction rating questionnaire. Transcripts of the couples’
conversations were run through a text analysis program to measure the use of plural
versus singular pronouns.

For the purposes of the analysis, each married pair was assessed as either an “actor”
(the person leading the discussion) or a “partner” (the person responding to the
discussion). The results showed that the actor’s use of we-talk was associated with a
change in marital satisfaction over time. For the partners, there was a link between the
use of we-talk and satisfaction when the baseline measurements were taken before the
study, but this was not predictive of any change in satisfaction over time.

“These results suggest that while the use of we-talk may be concurrently positively
associated with our partner's marital satisfaction, it is one's own use of we-talk that is
predictive of one's own marital satisfaction over time,” the authors write. 

In other words, thinking of your spouse as a supportive partner during stressful times,
such as raising a young child, may protect you from becoming dissatisfied with the
marriage as time goes on.

There are some clear limitations to this study, most obviously that only heterosexual
couples were included – the results may therefore not be generalizable to a wider
population. There could also have been some nuanced linguistic differences at play
between the conversations held in English and those held in French, which were not
captured because the analysis was performed in the same way in all cases.
However, it is important to note that much of the previous research has focused on the
effect of we-talk on relationships where one partner is experiencing a serious health
problem – that’s quite a different dynamic from this study, which looked at a stressful
situation that is shared between both partners. 

These results, therefore, represent an interesting piece of a complex puzzle. The authors
note several areas for further research, and ultimately conclude that “the present work
demonstrates that we-talk may serve as an observable indicator of relationship
satisfaction stability over time.” 

The study is published in the journal Personal Relationships.