Marriage was a financial agreement for keeping property and rearing children for a significant portion of human history. People sought a partner they could trust to keep their end of the bargain, but they didn’t anticipate to develop a strong emotional bond with them. Instead, they acquired that through their connections with friends and family. But these days, we anticipate that our soulmate will be our partner—the one person in our lives who can satisfy all of our wants, including sex, companionship, and emotional support. As a result, intimate couples typically feel a need to be emotionally close to their partners, with expectations that they should act and feel as one or that they should be able to read and understand each other’s thoughts. Relationship scientists describe “closeness” as the extent to which your own self-concept incorporates elements of your relationship partner because the term is ambiguous and you can be physically close yet emotionally distant or vice versa. Inclusion of other in self, is the term used to describe this. This “more is better” philosophy, meanwhile, frequently falls short in other areas of relationship study. Consider the correlation between sexual activity and relationship gratification. Numerous studies demonstrate that having sex together more frequently makes a couple happier overall. However, a closer examination of the data reveals that what matters most is whether couples are having as much sex as they desire.
