Key points
- Romantic relationships often include one person with more relationship power than the other.
- Unbalanced power is not necessarily problematic, but it could introduce certain threats.
- Higher relationship power may increase interest in attractive people outside of the relationship.
- Relationship benefits and investment may help counter the interest in others that comes with higher power.
What does it mean to hold power in a relationship? If you’ve ever felt like the person in “control” of a relationship, you might intuitively know that having power, in many ways, means having less to lose if a relationship is lost. You “need” the other person less than they need you. You can influence them, get your way, and shape the course of the relationship. To hold the power in a relationship is to have the power to keep it going—or to end it.
Know the Power in Your Relationship
What does the power dynamic look like in your relationship? Keep in mind that which partner holds more power might fluctuate over the course of a relationship or be fairly steady over time. To consider power within your own relationship, ask yourself these questions:
- To what degree do I make the serious decisions in my relationship?
- Can I convince my partner to go along with my ideas?
- Does my partner listen when I speak?
- Do I tend to comply with my partner’s wishes, or the reverse?
- How much do I depend on my relationship? How much does my partner?
Uneven Power May Not Be a Problem
It might seem like a power balance would be best for a healthy relationship, but new research using the latest statistical techniques undercuts this idea (Körner & Schütz, 2024). These scholars did not find evidence that partners whose power is evenly split are in happier relationships. Instead, they observed that individuals who had a strong sense of power in their relationships tended to report higher relationship satisfaction (Körner & Schütz, 2024). Power might be an interpersonal phenomenon, but it’s how individuals experience their sense of relationship power that aligns with how they evaluate their relationship.
The Risks of a Strong Power Differential
If feeling power in a relationship is linked to more relationship satisfaction (Körner & Schütz, 2024), are there any downsides to wielding the control? This becomes a particularly interesting question in light of relationship stability. Might feeling a lot of power in a relationship introduce any relationship risks?
Possibly. Recent research by Birnbaum and colleagues (2024) helps us with this question. Their work, which sampled Israeli individuals or couples (over 125 per study) and involved four studies and multiple methods (including two experimental studies), points to a key risk that comes with high power in your relationship.
Relationship Power Makes People Interested in Other Partners
Birnbaum and colleagues (2024) examined how feeling power within a relationship might orient people out of their relationship. They suspected that increases in relationship power might correspond with increases in self-perceived mate value. In other words, high-power partners start to think they are of greater value on the dating market. This in turn, the researchers predicted, would correspond with heightened romantic or sexual interest in alternative potential partners, i.e., people who are not their partner.
Their results all pointed to a clear pattern (Birnbaum et al., 2024): People perceiving high relationship power become more attracted to people outside of their relationship. They fantasize about people other than their partner, bestow more attention on them, and interact in more romantic/sexual ways with them. Interestingly, power itself did not emerge as the direct reason for these patterns. Rather, power may drive a heightened sense of one’s own mate value, which in turn, explains interest in others outside of the relationship.
Keeping High-Powered Partners Committed to their Relationships
If people with high relationship power may be primed to jeopardize their relationship, what can help them stay focused on their relationship? Classic models of relationship stability underscore the problem of paying attention to alternative partners (Rusbult, 1980), but these models also point to mechanisms that encourage stability.
For example, when people invest in their relationship, this investment encourages them to stay committed to their partner (Rubsult, 1980). Investments might include years of one’s life, secrets disclosed, resources committed (e.g., financial, material), shared friends, shared children—all of these (and so many more) work against other forces, such as increases in perceived mate value, to shape relationship stability.
In other words, it’s not just perceived power and mate value that matter. Also at play are the day-to-day rewards of being in a relationship and how much people’s lives are tied to their relationship, forces which may counter the effects of high perceived power.