Couple Identity

As close relationships progress over time, relationship partners may develop a couple identity and begin thinking of themselves as part of a couple rather than as separate individuals. Couple identity is at least somewhat consciously accessible, involving a sense of overlap with one's partner and the perception of the self and partner as a team or collective unit. Couple identity may also operate automatically and outside of conscious awareness. For instance, people with a strong couple identity are more likely to spontaneously use plural pronouns (we, us, ours) instead of singular pronouns (I, me, mine) when talking about their relationships. This entry discusses the nature of couple identity, how it develops, and its implications for individuals and their relationships.

Couple identity frequently manifests itself in observable behaviors and aspects of the couple's shared environment that reflect the blurred boundary between self and partner. Close relationship partners often share a social environment of mutual friends and engage in shared interests and activities together. They may cohabit, merging their possessions and creating a shared physical environment. They may even share bank accounts. Close relationships are often characterized by reduced [Page 336]personal borders, as revealed by frequent touching, sharing food, and close physical contact.

Couple identity also influences information processing in that information about close relationship partners tends to be processed similarly to information about the self. For instance, cognitive biases that normally favor the self over others are attenuated for close relationship partners, presumably because the formation of a couple identity minimizes the distinction between oneself and one's partner. Individuals with a strong couple identity tend to respond to a partner's successes and failures as their own. Evidence also suggests that mental representations of the self overlap with those of close partners. For instance, people are faster at judging whether a trait describes the self if it also applies to a close partner than if it does not, suggesting that shared traits are more accessible to the self-concept. Other research suggests that individuals make inferences about their own attributes by observing the behavior of others with whom they have a sense of merged identity. Close relationship partners even tend to encode, store, and retrieve information from each other as though they are drawing on a shared memory system.