Romantic partnerships can sometimes be messy, fragile, and — if we’re being honest — rarely fair. But a new study suggests that trying too hard to make them fair can backfire. When people approach love like a balance sheet, demanding that every favor be repaid, their satisfaction tends to decline over time.
Researchers followed more than 7,000 couples in Germany for 13 years. They wanted to know what happens when partners keep mental tallies of give-and-take. The answer, it turns out, is simple: the more transactional the mindset, the less happy the relationship.
“Love doesn’t thrive on ledgers,” said Haeyoung Gideon Park, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and lead author of the new study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
What It Means to “Keep Score”
Psychologists call this an exchange orientation. It’s the belief that if you sacrifice for your partner, they should return the favor in kind — or at least show proper appreciation. It’s the mental equivalent of a receipts folder for emotional labor.
The opposite is a communal orientation, where partners give freely without expecting repayment. This is the ideal in long-term relationships: people care for each other because they want to or feel like it, not because they’re racking up credits.
Past research already hinted that scorekeeping makes couples less satisfied. But most of those studies were small and involved a short follow-up period. The big question remained: does expecting reciprocity cause dissatisfaction, or does dissatisfaction make people more likely to keep score?
That’s where Park and colleagues stepped in. By drawing on the German Family Panel, they had access to repeated surveys from thousands of couples spanning over a decade. This allowed them to track both changes within individuals and the dynamic between partners.
The Downside of Ledgers in Romance
The results showed that, over time, most people naturally became less exchange-oriented. As bonds deepened, they relaxed their inner love accountants. But those who clung to transactional thinking — expecting something in return for every favor — saw their relationship satisfaction erode more steeply.
“When individuals reported higher exchange orientation than they typically did, they became less satisfied with their relationship in the future,” the authors wrote.
The study also looked at short-term changes. When someone’s exchange orientation spiked — say, during a stressful season when they suddenly started keeping score — their satisfaction dropped, both immediately and two years later. This suggests that transactional thinking doesn’t just reflect existing problems. It may actively drive them.
As Park told PsyPost: “Our findings suggest that keeping score isn’t just a reaction to relationship struggles — it can actually foreshadow them.”
One popular theory was that couples with matching mindsets might fare better. Two scorekeepers, the thinking went, might understand each other’s expectations. But the data didn’t bear that out.
Whether both partners kept score or just one, relationship quality dipped. “I was surprised that partner similarity in exchange orientation didn’t provide any benefits,” Park admitted.
Instead, the pattern was clear: the less emphasis on payback from either partner, the better the relationship tended to be.
Why This Matters
The study complicates how we think about fairness in love. On the one hand, relationships obviously shouldn’t be one-sided. Nobody thrives in an arrangement where one person gives everything and the other takes. But the data suggest that constant vigilance — always measuring whether your partner has given back enough — erodes intimacy.
It’s a paradox. Fairness matters, but fairness policed through mental bookkeeping may kill the very warmth that makes relationships worthwhile.
Mainstream relationship advice is filled with calls about making relationships “equal,” from splitting chores to dividing childcare. While those conversations matter, the new study suggests that the emotional mindset behind them matters just as much. Couples who approach division of labor as a tit-for-tat arrangement may be setting themselves up for long-term dissatisfaction.
That being said, the study also has its limits. Data were collected every two years, which may miss short-lived changes. And the surveys couldn’t capture all the nuances, like whether exchange orientation plays out differently in chores versus intimacy.
Still, the sheer scale and length of the study make its findings hard to ignore. Over more than a decade, one message came through consistently: expecting repayment makes love weaker, not stronger.
As Park and colleagues concluded: “Rather than adopting a tit-for-tat mindset, partners should ideally strive to meet each other’s needs and desires with no strings attached.”
