Romantic relationships are a significant part of many people’s lives, playing a pivotal role in shaping individuals’ emotional and physical well-being. Emotion work, characterized as the behaviours relevant to the enhancement of significant others’ emotional well-being and the provision of emotional support, can shape the quality of romantic relationships, but prior research has found mixed findings as to what is the “right” amount of emotion work for relational outcomes. The present study aimed to address this gap using dyadic response surface analysis (DRSA) in a sample of 149 Portuguese couples to examine the degree to which romantic couples performed similar versus dissimilar emotion work and whether specific patterns of couples’ similarity may uniquely contribute to their relationship and sexual well-being. Findings suggested that higher overall levels of emotion work in the relationship, rather than a perfect matching between partners, were associated with greater relationship satisfaction and sexual well-being (i.e., higher sexual desire and lower sexual distress), but also to greater relationship conflict. These results underscore the importance of both partners’ active engagement in emotion work towards each other and suggest that effectively managing differences may be more beneficial than striving for a perfect match.
Moreira et al. (Thu,) studied this question.