Some people tend to escalate in tense situations – if you’re snippy or weird, they’re 20% more snippy or weird at you. Others dampen conflicts – if you’re hostile, they’re 20% less hostile back at you. Let’s flatten this trait into one number for any given person and call it their RR: reactivity ratio. Like an albedo index for negative emotions, except people can emit more tension back at you than they received.
Obviously, we most notice RR as a trait in people with extreme values – people who hear one slightly passive aggressive comment and escalate into a fight, or people who look kind of confused when outright insulted, and don’t take the bait. In close relationships we’re also sensitive to whether RR is above or below 1 – in a very naive model, it seems obvious that two people with an RR of 0.99 have a chance at a good relationship, but two people with an RR of 1.01 do not. (In the real world I think the threshold is more like 0.85. A decay rate of 1% is pretty slow; every conflict will be a protracted ordeal that leaves relationship wear and tear.)
Setting aside of what RR is good for any individual to have (probably below 1, but above 0.2), it seems to me that a romantic relationship only works if the multiple of the couple’s RR is below 1. The higher your RR, the lower your partner’s needs to be for the relationship to work.
RR isn’t just about the intensity of reflected negative feelings, but also
- how polite someone are when they express those feelings
- how longwinded those expressions are
- how long they hold onto bad feelings (and bring them up again when you’re not expecting it)
Also while I think RR is surprisingly well modeled as a single number, it’s obviously more complicated than that – I and my husband are high RR about some modes of argument or topics, but luckily have very little overlap. The things I get hot tempered about are things he tends to go, “hmm, I think you’re probably right, sorry honey” about, and vice versa.
And I’ve met people who seemed to have a high RR but were easy to have conflicts with once I found their wavelength. (Although seeming to have high RR produces the same effects as having high RR to a large extent.) A type that comes to mind is a disagreeable person who seems to think you’re stupid and terrible, but doesn’t take it personally when you explain why they seem stupid to you. It turns out they don’t get more disagreeable because you’re disagreeable at them. They’re just always like that. It doesn’t mean they’re pleasant to talk to, but they’re not reactive the way you initially thought they were.
I started thinking about this in the context of poly. I was wondering whether I now had anything worthwhile to say about poly 9 years in – particularly, whether I have anything informative to say to friends who wonder if they’ll have a good time if they try it.
One of my higher-confidence conclusions is: err on not getting into poly if you have an unusually high RR. If you’re monogamous, you find someone with an RR low enough that you can have a happy relationship, and then you have a happy relationship. If you’re poly, you find someone with an RR low enough that you can have a happy relationship, but it’ll turn out that all the other high RR people are attracted to your low RR partner for the same reason you were, and now you have high RR metamours. This can still be okay (especially if you’re low jealousy, or very friendly/agreeable when you’re not activated) but is a recipe for stress.