Our cultural obsession with romantic love runs deep. These days, one is hard-pressed to find a movie that doesn’t feature a romantic plotline or a hit song that doesn’t allude to romantic love. But it doesn’t end there. Even TV shows about singles tend to revolve around finding love and romance. Indeed, what would HBO’s “Sex and the City” be without Carrie Bradshaw’s seemingly endless, and often fruitless, quest for romantic love?
Our cultural obsession with romantic love is not surprising given that humans have a deep-rooted need to belong—a need that can be met through high-quality, mutually caring relationships. Given the cultural milieu around romantic love, it is also unsurprising that many people––including single icons like Carrie Bradshaw––attempt to meet their need to belong, in part, by seeking high-quality romantic relationships. In such a culture, it is triply unsurprising that psychologists have devoted considerable time and energy to understanding the psychological adaptations that facilitate romantic love and belonging.
One such adaptation is the shifting of people’s self-esteem definitions to prioritize the romantic bond, in a process called psychological attunement. During this process, self-esteem becomes more responsive to the quality of one’s romantic relationships—with high-quality relationships boosting self-esteem and low-quality relationships undermining it. Essentially, then, psychological attunement motivates one to invest in one’s romantic relationships because doing so ultimately benefits one’s own sense of self-esteem and belonging.
But not everyone has a romantic partner, nor necessarily even wants one. In fact, more people are single than ever before and want to remain that way. So where does this leave single people? Suffering quietly from a lack of self-esteem and belonging? Or might it be the case that singles’ self-esteem attunes to the important relationships in their lives? My colleagues and I wanted to find out.
Because singles are known for having many friends whom they see on a regular basis and to whom they may experience strong feelings of attachment, we hypothesized that singles would exhibit psychological attunement to their friendships. We further expected singles’ attunement to friendships to be even stronger than that of partnered people, who presumably meet their need to belong more through their romantic partner.
We followed 279 undergraduates over the course of their university careers. Every few months, we asked them about their self-esteem, the quality of their friendships, and whether they were in a romantic relationship. We expected that self-esteem would dynamically shift to prioritize the kinds of relationships that were most likely to provide a sense of belonging and increased self-esteem. In other words, we expected that undergraduates’ self-esteem would be more attuned to the quality of their friendships at times when they were single compared to times when they were in a romantic relationship.
That’s exactly what we found. Although friendship quality and self-esteem were linked for both single and partnered undergraduates, friendship quality had a bigger impact on undergraduates’ self-esteem when they were single compared to when they were in a romantic relationship (about 1.7 times the magnitude). In other words, self-esteem was more strongly attuned to the quality of one’s friendships when single than when in a relationship.
But that’s not all. At a separate point in the study, we asked undergraduates how invested they were in their friendships (for example, how much they stood to lose if their friendship were to end). We found that single undergraduates were generally more invested in their friendships than their partnered counterparts, and that this investment predicted greater subsequent friendship quality and self-esteem for single undergraduates. It should be noted that singles’ greater friendship investment didn’t lead to any significant differences in friendship quality between single and partnered undergraduates in the short term. But when we looked at the trajectory of friendship quality over a longer period, we found that single undergraduates’ friendship quality remained stable whereas partnered undergraduates’ friendship quality declined over time. So, it’s possible that partnered people’s lesser investments in their friendships may eventually lead to declines in their long-term friendship quality.
Taken together, our findings suggest that psychological attunement does indeed occur in friendships and thus is not solely a romantic process. Moreover, our results demonstrate how the self-esteem system shifts to prioritize the kinds of relationships that optimize belonging, given one’s relationship status. So––rather than fixate on finding the perfect romantic partner––singles like Carrie Bradshaw are smart to attune to and invest in the friendships they already have, as these friendships may ultimately provide them with the strong sense of belonging that everybody needs.
For Further Reading
Fisher, A.N., Stinson, D.A., Wood, J.V., Holmes, J.G. & Cameron, J.J. (2021). Singlehood and the attunement of self-esteem to friendships. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620988460
Alexandra N. Fisher is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter in the UK. Her research focuses on self and identity in close relationships.
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