Sacrifice in relationships and staying true to yourself

What a person hopes to make possible

The researchers distinguished between two kinds of motivation. Approach goals involve seeking a positive experience, such as making a partner happy, responding to their needs or creating more closeness. Avoidance goals involve preventing an unwanted experience, such as guilt, a partner’s disappointment or an argument.

Both kinds of motivation concern something consequential to the person making the sacrifice. They can also occur together. In the studies that measured people’s own motives, stronger approach goals tended to accompany stronger avoidance goals. Someone could want to make a partner happy and also want to avoid disappointing them. The researchers measured the two motives separately, allowing them to examine what each contributed.

Authenticity brought another dimension to this account. The paper describes it as feeling that one’s actions fit one’s own feelings, attitudes and beliefs. Participants reported how authentic or true to themselves they expected to feel, or had felt, while sacrificing. This was their experience of the choice, rather than an outside assessment of whether they were being a good partner.

Imagining a sacrifice that feels like your choice

The first study involved 90 married adults in the United States. They considered three hypothetical situations, including the work function and giving up a Saturday morning outing with friends to accompany a partner on a long car trip. Each situation asked them to imagine choosing the sacrifice, then report their reasons for doing so and how they expected to feel.

Participants with stronger approach motives expected to feel more authentic and more positively about making the sacrifice. Stronger avoidance motives were associated with feeling less authentic. The corresponding association with less positive feelings about the sacrifice was weaker and fell just short of the conventional threshold for statistical significance.

The researchers then examined whether authenticity could help account for these patterns. Their statistical analysis supported the proposed link between motives, authenticity and feelings about the sacrifice. Once authenticity was included, the remaining associations between motives and those feelings were no longer statistically significant.

The sacrifices also varied in scale. Alongside an evening out or a car journey, the first study asked people to imagine choosing between jobs, one of which required regular time away from home. Across these situations, authenticity concerned how the person understood the choice. A decision could involve a real cost and still express something they valued about their life with a partner.

This suggested a possible explanation for why giving could feel rewarding. The purpose of the sacrifice was related to whether people could recognize themselves in the choice. Because participants reported motives and expected feelings together, however, this study could not establish which came first. People anticipating a happy experience might also describe their reasons for it more positively.

Giving the same act a different purpose

The second study tested the role of motivation more directly. It involved 221 adults in the United States, most of whom were married, with the remainder in exclusive dating relationships. Participants considered nine hypothetical sacrifices drawn from familiar situations. These included doing a household task neither partner enjoyed, deciding against a purchase for the sake of joint finances and changing a schedule for a partner.

This time, participants were randomly assigned a set of reasons for imagining those choices. One group imagined sacrificing to make their partner happy, feel like a caring person and create greater satisfaction in the relationship. The other imagined sacrificing to avoid guilt, disappointing their partner and conflict.

The approach reasons included feeling like a caring person as well as making the partner happy. Giving was therefore allowed to matter to the giver, too. The study did not require a choice to be free of personal meaning or satisfaction in order to count as care for someone else.

The actions were the same across the groups. What changed was the purpose participants were asked to imagine. Those given approach reasons expected to feel more authentic and more positively about the sacrifices. They also anticipated better relationship well-being. That measure included satisfaction, closeness and love, alongside lower conflict and fewer feelings of being disappointed by or taken for granted by a partner.

Authenticity accounted for part of these differences. It did not account for all of them, leaving room for other aspects of motivation to matter. Feeling that a choice fits who we are appears to be one part of the experience of giving.

Random assignment strengthens the evidence that the supplied motives influenced participants’ expected responses. The important boundary is that these remained imagined sacrifices. Participants were not asked to do the unwanted chore or change their actual plans. The experiment shows that different reasons can change how people anticipate experiencing a sacrifice. It does not establish that adopting a different explanation will change the experience of an actual relationship.

What happened on ordinary days

The third study moved into daily life. Seventy-three students in dating relationships at a Canadian university completed nightly surveys during a two-week period. They reported whether they had encountered an opportunity to give up something they wanted, or do something they did not want to do, for their partner. When they had chosen to sacrifice, they described the experience and their motives.

The sacrifices included activities involving school or work, errands and chores, communication and recreation. The researchers examined whether a person’s experience differed on days when a particular motive was stronger than that person’s own average. This allowed them to look beyond differences between people who generally felt better or worse about their relationships.

Feeling authentic was also assessed for the particular sacrifice that day. The study treated it as an experience that could vary within a relationship, rather than dividing people into those who were authentic and those who were not. Someone could feel more at home in one act of giving than in another.

On days when participants reported stronger approach motives than usual, they also reported feeling more authentic while sacrificing. They experienced greater personal well-being, measured through their emotions and satisfaction with life, and better relationship well-being. The pattern connected a purpose people valued with feeling like themselves during the sacrifice and feeling better in the course of the day.

The avoidance findings were more mixed. Stronger avoidance motives were associated with feeling less authentic. Their overall association with lower relationship well-being did not reach conventional statistical significance, and there was no statistically significant overall association with personal well-being. The results therefore do not support a blanket claim that avoiding disappointment or conflict reliably made participants feel worse that day.

The researchers did find an indirect association between avoidance motives and poorer relationship well-being through lower authenticity. In other words, the part of avoidance motivation associated with feeling less true to oneself was also associated with feeling worse about the relationship. That more specific result can coexist with the less clear overall association. Authenticity also helped account for the approach findings, explaining part of the association with relationship well-being and the association with personal well-being in the researchers’ model.

Further analyses considered the kind of sacrifice, the time and effort involved, how often someone had made similar sacrifices and how much they believed their partner needed it. The authors reported that accounting for these features did not remove the pattern linking motives with authenticity and well-being. The reason for giving appeared to contribute something beyond the practical demands of the act itself.

Understanding giving in the relationship where it happens

The diary study brings the findings closer to everyday experience, but participants described motives and feelings after the sacrifices had occurred. A partner’s response could have influenced both. The researchers compared alternative statistical explanations and found support for their proposed account, yet these comparisons cannot establish a sequence in which a motive changes authenticity and authenticity then changes well-being.

The authors also considered how a partner might help shape the reason for giving. They proposed that presenting an opportunity as something to do together might encourage approach motives, while inducing guilt might encourage avoidance motives. They did not test that comparison. It points to a question about the exchange between two people, beyond the explanation the giver offers afterward.

All three studies also included only one member of each couple. They tell us about the experience of the person contemplating or reporting a sacrifice. They do not show how the recipient felt, whether the recipient recognized the sacrifice or how the exchange affected both people over time.

Most participants were in relatively satisfying relationships, and the daily study involved young adults. The authors explicitly left open whether the patterns would differ in more distressed relationships or in cultural settings where maintaining harmony carries a different meaning. They also acknowledged that, in some circumstances, making a sacrifice to avoid a negative outcome might be preferable to declining it. These possibilities were questions for further research, rather than findings established by the three studies.

That context gives the distinction between motives its proper place. The research examined reasons for giving within particular relationships. It did not test a general rule that people should sacrifice more, or that giving is always better than keeping their original plans.

Its contribution is more specific. An immediate preference, such as staying home instead of attending a partner’s work event, is one part of what a person wants. Caring about the partner’s experience may be another. The studies suggest that pursuing a positive purpose in a valued relationship can be consistent with feeling authentic while giving something up. A person can recognize the cost of the choice and still recognize themselves in the reason for making it.