The Language Style of Happy Couples

Could how you use language predict how your relationships turn out? To investigate, a couple of researchers from The University of Texas at Austin studied what they call "language style matching." LSM occurs almost immediately after we begin to interact with someone else; the way we talk—the grammatical structure of our sentences—naturally starts to mirror how the other person speaks.

To see if the level of LSM could tell us anything about a close relationship, the researchers decided to look at the writing of two couples: poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Specifically, the researchers looked at how the couples used “function” words like “the” and “a,” "him" and "her," "thus" and "however," and other words that have virtually no meaning on their own (as opposed to nouns, verbs, and most adjectives and adverbs). The researchers found that:

Linguistic synchrony between Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ poetry mirrors that found in the much happier literary couple, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. When Plath and Hughes were relatively happier, LSM in their professional work was higher. When their relationship fell apart and the authors began to separate, their language use also became more discrepant.

Except that:

Even at its highest point, LSM for Plath’s and Hughes’s poetry was much lower than the Brownings’ average degree of matching. Taking into consideration the relative happiness of each couple, this should not come as a surprise.

The researchers theorize that "rather than indicating liking, LSM is likely a better indicator that two people in an interaction are paying attention to and seeking to understand one another." Thus, they wondered if LSM could be used to predict the outcome of a relationship.

So in a newer study, they looked at transcripts of speed-dates and found that 33.3 percent of pairs who had an LSM above the median wanted to see each other again, compared with only 9.1 percent of pairs with an LSM at or below the median. Then they looked at instant messages that couples sent and found that 76.7 percent of couples with an LSM higher than the median were still dating three months later, compared with 53.5 percent of those who had an LSM at or below the median. Sure enough, they say, "an unobtrusive measure of nonconscious verbal matching uniquely predicted mutual romantic interest and relationship stability."