How long will your love last?

Just think how much emotional pain could be avoided if humans knew just when to exit a romantic relationship? Knowing whether to break up or stay together is a wrenching question that often lacks an easy answer.

Past studies have found that people are often unable or reluctant to express their true feelings about their partners. Researchers conducted a test on American participants to find if a relationship is going to fall apart. The test involved s uncovering what people really think of or feel about their partners.

The participants were asked to provide their partner's first name and two other words that related to the person like a pet name or distinct characteristic. The volunteers then watched a monitor as words were presented. The words conveyed positive ideas, such as "vacation" and "peace" or negative ideas, such as "tragedy" and "criticise," along with the partner-related words supplied by the participants. The respondents were asked to press a bar when they saw various words. One test featured negative words while the other combined the good words along with the partner-related words. The suggestion was to get people's automatic reactions to the words. If people have generally good associations with their partners, they would perform the "good words" task more easily than the "bad words."

The participants who found it easier to associate their partner with bad things, and had difficulty associating their partner with good things, were more likely to separate over the next year.

In deteriorating relationships, the negative associations people begin to form about their partner may be too subtle or threatening for them to recognise in themselves or too socially undesirable for them to report to others.

The researchers suggested that such a measure could be useful to therapists in trying to uncover feelings clients are unwilling to divulge and to differentiate the nature of the problem in a relationship.