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After weeks – if not months – of swiping, chatting and matching, you’ve finally found a contender. Your potential partner is intelligent, understanding and also looks at the world the same as you. The first date soon follows, then a second and before you know it you’re sleeping together every weekend. It’s like it should be that way. There’s just one problem: you live and work 200 kilometers away from each other.
For now it’s perfect. During the week you have your own life, during the weekend you have each other. But you and your new lover both know that this is not a sustainable situation. At some point someone has to make a sacrifice. That’s when one of you moves in with the other. Would you sacrifice yourself for your new lover?
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Sacrifice for relationship
Relationships are give and take. You want one thing, and your partner wants something else – whether that has to do with the color of the bedding, where you’ll live or something else. That often takes the form of a compromise and you both give a little. The final result will be somewhere between what you both want. But sometimes compromise is not possible and you are asked to sacrifice yourself for the relationship.
Think about what happened the last time you did something you didn’t really want to do for a partner. Did you suppress your emotions to maintain the relationship? Did you downplay your feelings? If you’ve made a sacrifice for the relationship before, you know what that feels like. You ignored yourself for the relationship, in fact by eliminating your own will and labeling it as irrelevant.
While sacrifice can be unavoidable in a relationship, sacrificing small and big things, it’s not always easy to do. On the one hand you want to stay true to yourself, on the other hand you want to do what it takes to make the relationship work . What happens to relationships when a partner sacrifices has been the subject of research again recently.
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Hidden costs
Sacrifices in relationships can come with hidden costs for both the giver and the receiver, according to a new study published in the Journal of Current Opinion in Psychology. These costs can pile up and cause bigger problems for the relationship in the future.
“It is certainly honorable to put your self-interest aside for the sake of your partner or your relationship,” explains psychologist and research author Francesca Righetti. “However, our research shows that there is a difficult aftermath for both the giver and the receiver.” Righetti analyzed more than 80 previous studies for her research to assess sacrifice in relationships.
“The giver experiences lower well-being after the sacrifice and the receiver begins to have mixed feelings about the sacrifice and the partner,” Righetti explains in Psychology Today . “On the one hand, the recipient feels grateful, loved and accepted, but he also feels guilty and that he is owed something. And we know that mixed feelings are not good for relationships.”
“Sacrifice carries a lot of weight because it requires one to give up one’s own preferences and goals,” she adds. “It is especially detrimental to the well-being of the giver and to the relationship when the focus is on these costs.” Another important finding is that sacrifice can have greater consequences for women than for men.
“We think it may be that women sacrifice more in their relationships and that because of gender roles they are also expected to sacrifice more and do not receive as much appreciation and validation as men for their sacrifices,” Righetti says. “In other words, they may mainly experience the costs and very little of the benefits.”
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This type can be satisfied with it
Righetti’s research summarizes previous research on sacrifice in relationships. In an earlier study from 2014, researchers also examined what happens to relationships when a partner sacrifices something. They discovered that if you are the type of person who is okay with sacrificing yourself, you are likely to be happy in your relationship.
“People who are more willing to sacrifice for an intimate partner are more satisfied with their relationships,” the researchers concluded. They also found that it makes these people’s partners more committed to the relationship. But… there is a but. When people sacrifice themselves reluctantly, and then suppress how upset they are, relationships do not benefit. According to the research, this creates an obstacle later in the relationship.
For most people, the word sacrifice has a negative connotation, especially because it means sacrificing something that is important to you. But in the case of a sacrifice for the relationship, the meaning changes, because what you gain should be more important than what you lose. And this is how every sacrifice should be: you trade something that is important to you for something that is even more important to you.
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