Can You Recognize the Qualities of a Loyal Mate?

KEY POINTS

• Within relationships, people respond to events based on the way they expect others to respond.
• Friends were more likely to expect passive responses to expressions of dissatisfaction than romantic partners.
• Kindness, attention, patience, and expressions of love and respect, are all manifestations of relational loyalty.

Some people are just always “nice.” They open doors for strangers, remember the names of your children, and always greet friends with a smile and a kind word.

You might know many people who behave this way, both personally and professionally. But would you also describe these people as loyal? How would you know?

And how important is loyalty when it comes to the short list of qualities you are looking for in a romantic partner? The answer might be more experiential than empirical.

Love and Loyalty

P.L. Rika Fatimah et al. (2009) conducted research designed to explore the issue of loyalty within marriage. Recognizing marriage as complex and abstract, the team acknowledged that one of the challenges in achieving relational longevity is recognizing differences between spouses and their respective needs, which underscores the importance of loyalty.

Their purpose was to identify priority needs within a marriage that could spark a higher degree of loyalty by viewing the union with clearer and simpler concepts by adopting a quality perspective.

Interestingly, among many other factors discussed, Fatimah et al. identified two basic dimensions that need to be improved—one of which they termed “Marital Relationship,” which includes personal interactions, conversations, conflict episodes, and conversations. One of the many interesting ideas they proposed to improve marital interaction was implementing a “rolling job design” designed to enhance the variety and skills exercised within the marriage.

They give the examples of a husband who is willing to try his hand at cooking, or a wife attempting to maintain a car. Before we joke that some couples might not want to “try this at home,” it is the willingness to experience challenges and difficulties traditionally faced by one spouse or the other that might afford a deeper understanding of these challenges.

Faithful Friends First

Before a couple ties the knot, it turns out that friendship offers some clues as to how to recognize relational loyalty. Cheryl Harasymchuk and Beverley Fehr (2019) studied the manifestation of dissatisfaction between romantic partners versus friends.

Acknowledging interpersonal script models, they note that people respond to events based on the way they expect others to respond. They found that friends were more likely to expect passive responses to expressions of dissatisfaction, and romantic partners expected responses to be more active.

Regarding loyalty, however, they note that research on romantic relationships has revealed that loyalty responses have less impact on relationships than voice responses. They note that perhaps loyalty is a different construct, in that it is less visible than other responses, and thus has less of an effect.

Perhaps We Know It When We See It

Research aside, is there an easier way to measure loyalty? Before we default to describing the unqualified (undeserved?) admiration and love we get from our four-legged family members, most of us are perfectly capable of recognizing loyalty from partners and spouses as well.

Kindness, attention, patience, expressions of love and respect, are all manifestations of relational loyalty. These qualities solidify friendships, reinforce romance, and strengthen marriage. We don’t need a study to convince us of the value of these basic, foundational principles in building quality relationships that will stand the test of time.

So, perhaps public acts of politeness are less important than private professions of dependability and devotion. Whether a couple is walking down the aisle or into the sunset at the beach, love and loyalty do indeed appear to go hand in hand.