“Love doesn’t thrive on ledgers”: Keeping score in relationships foreshadows decline, study finds

People often say relationships should be fair. But new research suggests that keeping score may actually backfire. A long-term study of couples in Germany found that when partners expected something in return for favors or sacrifices, their satisfaction tended to decline over time. The study was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Relationship researchers have long distinguished between two broad mindsets: communal and exchange orientations. A communal approach involves caring for a partner’s needs without expecting direct repayment. By contrast, an exchange orientation involves a sense of keeping score. A person might expect their partner to repay a favor, match effort, or show appreciation in proportion to what was given.

Past research has repeatedly found that exchange orientation tends to predict lower relationship satisfaction. But most of that work was based on cross-sectional data, which can only capture snapshots at one point in time. That makes it hard to determine whether expecting reciprocity leads to dissatisfaction or whether dissatisfaction makes people more likely to keep score.

Little was known about how exchange orientation changes over time. Is it a fixed personality trait, or does it shift with the ups and downs of a relationship? Another open question was whether similarity between partners in exchange orientation might help or hurt. Some researchers speculated that if both partners shared the same transactional mindset, they might better understand each other’s expectations. Others suspected that any form of scorekeeping, whether mutual or not, could disrupt the emotional connection that supports long-term intimacy.

“There’s been growing public concern that modern romance is becoming increasingly transactional—where people approach love less as emotional connection and more as a ledger of give-and-take. I thought exchange orientation, or the tendency to keep track of what one gives and receives, provided a timely and theoretically meaningful way to study this trend. It allowed us to ask whether adopting a transactional mindset actually shapes the course of romantic relationships,” explained study author Haeyoung Gideon Park, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto.

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To investigate, the research team turned to a uniquely comprehensive dataset: a nationally representative panel of German couples followed for over a decade. This gave them the opportunity to track not only changes within individuals but also patterns across partners.

The researchers drew from the German Family Panel (pairfam), a long-running longitudinal study that follows individuals and their partners across different stages of life. For this project, they analyzed responses from 7,293 heterosexual couples who participated in up to seven survey waves over a 13-year period. The surveys were conducted every two years.

Participants responded to questions assessing their exchange orientation, such as whether they expected something in return when doing a favor or giving in to their partner. They also rated their overall satisfaction with their relationship using a standard scale. By collecting repeated responses from both members of each couple, the researchers could examine both individual and dyadic patterns.

To analyze the data, the researchers used a statistical approach called latent curve modeling with structured residuals. This method allowed them to separate long-term trends from shorter-term fluctuations and distinguish within-person effects (how someone changes over time) from between-person differences (how people compare to each other on average). They also used a technique called dyadic response surface analysis to explore whether partners’ similarity in exchange orientation had any impact on their shared satisfaction.

Across the full sample, the researchers observed that most individuals became less exchange-oriented as their relationships matured. In other words, over time, people were less likely to expect direct repayment or acknowledgment for sacrifices made in the relationship. This overall shift away from transactional thinking suggests that romantic partners may gradually adopt a more communal mindset as their bond deepens.

Importantly, the speed of this shift mattered. People who showed slower declines in exchange orientation were also more likely to experience steeper drops in relationship satisfaction over the years. This pattern held true even when controlling for initial satisfaction levels. It suggests that clinging to a transactional mindset may interfere with the natural development of emotional intimacy.

The researchers also examined more immediate changes within individuals. They found that when a person’s exchange orientation increased from their usual level at a given time point, their relationship satisfaction tended to drop—both in that moment and two years later. These time-lagged effects support the idea that expecting something in return may gradually wear down relationship quality.

“Our findings suggest that keeping score isn’t just a reaction to relationship struggles—it can actually foreshadow them,” Park told PsyPost. “In other words, when people become more focused on payback, their satisfaction tends to decline in the years that follow. We also found that couples didn’t necessarily benefit from both being transactional; what mattered most was whether either partner was focused on keeping things even. The less emphasis on payback, the better the relationship tended to be.”

The researchers found little evidence that being dissatisfied led people to become more exchange-oriented later on. This points to a directional link in which transactional thinking tends to reduce satisfaction, not the reverse.

“I expected that declines in satisfaction would predict increases in exchange orientation, but that wasn’t the case,” Park said. “One limitation is that our data were collected every two years, which may have missed short-term or situational shifts.”

Another key finding concerned partner similarity. While it might seem intuitive that sharing a similar mindset would promote harmony, the data did not support this assumption. Couples who were equally high or equally low in exchange orientation did not report greater satisfaction than couples who differed. Instead, relationship satisfaction was lower whenever either partner was more exchange-oriented, regardless of the other’s views.

These results challenge the idea that “matching” mindsets protect relationships. Instead, they suggest that lower levels of exchange orientation in both partners—regardless of similarity—tend to support higher satisfaction.

“I was surprised that partner similarity in exchange orientation didn’t provide any benefits,” Park said. “As a follow-up, We’re now examining the emotional processes that underlie the negative effects of exchange orientation, which may help explain why this mindset is harmful regardless of whether both partners share it.”

It is important to note that the findings are correlational, which means they cannot establish definite causation. While the use of lagged analyses and longitudinal methods strengthens the argument for directional effects, it remains possible that unmeasured factors influenced both exchange orientation and relationship satisfaction.

Future research could explore whether the effects of exchange orientation differ across relationship stages. A transactional mindset might feel more acceptable in early dating relationships, but less so in long-term partnerships where emotional bonds are deeper. Another avenue is to examine how exchange orientation plays out across different domains.

“Right now, we’re investigating the emotional processes that contribute to the harmful effects of exchange orientation,” Park explained. “Looking further ahead, I’d like to examine whether these dynamics differ across relationship stages (such as new vs. long-term relationships), across domains (such as chores, finances, or intimacy), and across cultures. It’s also important to understand what leads people to adopt a transactional mindset in the first place, and whether it can be intentionally altered.”

“Our study highlights a simple but important message: love doesn’t thrive on ledgers,” the researcher added. “Fairness matters, but constantly expecting something in return can quietly erode warmth and trust. Letting go of the mental tally may help relationships flourish.”

The study, “‘Pay Me Back’: Testing the Implications of Long-Term Changes and Partner Similarity in Exchange Orientation Within Intimate Relationships,” was authored by Haeyoung Gideon Park, Matthew D. Johnson, Amie M. Gordon, and Emily A. Impett.