Shaping Romantic Relationships: Exploring Interactions with Psychotherapy and Culture

How did you spend Valentine’s Day? Whether it was spent with a loved one, happily or unhappily single, or doing university work, romantic relationships are a common experience for the majority of people at some point in their life. Most people can vouch for the fact that they greatly impact wellbeing, life-satisfaction, and stress. However, relationships don’t just affect us; we shape our relationships through our own emotional regulation, conflict resolution, and attachment styles. Interestingly, many of the variables that shape romantic relationships are also skills and characteristics which are often worked on in psychotherapy, yet this link has been previously neglected.

In recent years, psychotherapy has become a common experience for many people across Europe. Some enter therapy during difficult periods, others out of curiosity or a desire for personal growth. Regardless of the reason, therapy can influence how individuals relate to emotions, boundaries, and interpersonal tension. Yet these changes do not occur in isolation. They inevitably interact with close relationships, especially romantic ones. Despite this, research has often studied psychotherapy as if it occurred in a vacuum, rarely exploring how individual psychotherapy experiences shape everyday relationship dynamics.

This cross-European project focuses on a simple but overlooked distinction: whether neither partner, one partner, or both partners in a romantic relationship are in or have previously received psychotherapy. Rather than concentrating on clinical outcomes, our study looks at how relationships are experienced in daily life. Areas such as relationship quality, insecurities, forgiveness, religiosity, love, and communication will be explored using well-established psychological questionnaires.

By collecting data from participants across Europe, the study recognizes the importance of cultural context. Attitudes toward therapy, intimacy, and emotional expression vary widely between countries, and these differences matter for how relationships function. Including participants from diverse backgrounds and relationship types, including LGBTQIA+ relationships, allows the project to capture psychotherapy clients’ realities and support better understanding in both research and practice.

In this blog post, we will explore three variables which are relevant to both romantic relationships and impacted by psychotherapy and culture.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness refers to the moral value that involves the act of showing mercy and love to an offending individual (Enright, 2011), leading in a shift to a neutral attitude towards that person (McCullough et al., 2000). The scientific study on forgiveness emerged in 1989 (Enright et al., 1989), influenced by Piaget’s (1932) and Kohlberg’s (1969) moral-development frameworks, and focused on how adolescents’ thinking regarding when forgiveness is warranted change with age. The first psychological outcome study evaluating forgiveness interventions was conducted in 1993 by Hebl and Enright, based on the preceding foundational work.

Forgiveness is measured at multiple levels in line with different theories and practical needs, such as trait measures that assess forgiveness tendencies that predict general well-being (Gallo-Giunzioni et al., 2020), offence-specific measures that examine reactions to specific wrongdoings and track forgiveness over time, relationship-specific measures that evaluate forgiveness in romantic relationships (Paleari et al., 2009), and intergroup measures that focus on conflicts between different racial and identity groups (Davis et al., 2015). In the current study, the 10-item Trait Forgivingness Scale (TFS; Berry et al., 2005) will be employed to assess participants’ dispositional tendency.

Forgiveness seems to be a key aspect in the study of psychotherapy and romantic relationships’ dynamics, as unresolved upsets can lead to negative emotions and interfere with relationship satisfaction and stability (Sells & Hargrave, 1998; Ferch, 1998; McCullough et al., 2000; Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2000; Worthington, 2007). Forgiveness interventions, including therapy and education (Enright, 2011), reduce stress (Worthington, 2007), promote general well-being (Wade et al., 2009) and support beneficial relationship outcomes such as reconciliation and reduced desire for revenge (Sells & Hargrave, 1998).

Apart from psychotherapy and relationships, cultural differences also play a big role in understanding and showing forgiveness (Kurniati et al., 2020), maybe because of the different ways forgiveness is perceived and practiced across different cultural contexts (McCauley et al., 2022). Cross-cultural research would highlight how cultural norms and values affect the expression and effectiveness of forgiveness, as well as the impact of therapy on well-being within the relationship.

Relationship quality

Relationship quality refers to the subjective judgement of a couple’s bond, including stability, the depth of intimacy, support, and happiness shared between partners. This topic emerged scientifically in the 1930s (e.g., Terman, 1938), shifting researchers’ focus from marital status to marital happiness, as they recognized that staying together does not equal thriving. We measure this utilizing self-report scales—such as the ones in our study—because the most accurate predictor of a relationship’s health is partners’ own perception, rather than external observation.

While unexplored, there is reason to expect that psychotherapy and relationship quality could be connected. Research suggests that when people improve their subjective well-being and life satisfaction through psychotherapy (Medina et al., 2023; Furchtlehner et al., 2024), their relationship quality often follows suit. However, there is a lot more to explore once culture is thrown into the mix. To the best of our knowledge, there are not enough studies exploring how psychotherapy experiences influence relationship satisfaction differences across European countries. By targeting these unknowns in our study, we could better understand contributing factors to the changes in well-being we see in those attending psychotherapy, as well as how they differ according to culture.

Love

Love was first introduced to scientific literature as a measurable social-psychological construct by Zick Rubin in 1970, who defined it as an interpersonal attitude distinct from simple “liking”. However, most modern research is based on Robert Sternberg’s (1986) Triangular Theory of Love. According to the theory, love consists of three components: intimacy, which encompasses the feelings of closeness, connection, and bonding experienced in a relationship; passion, which captures the drives that generate romance, physical attraction, sexual arousal; and decision/commitment, which involves the short‑term choice to love someone and the long‑term conviction to sustain that love. To measure these dimensions, our study utilizes the Short Version Triangular Love Scale (TLS-15) by Kowal and colleagues (2024).

Our interest in love as a variable arises from its role in personal and relationship well-being, as well as its sensitivity to psychological change. Psychotherapy can encourage self‑reflection, emotional regulation, and a more secure attachment style, all of which are known precursors to greater intimacy and stronger commitment in romantic bonds (Kowal et al., 2024). By working on developing personal insight and reducing destructive relational patterns, psychotherapy may happen to improve individuals’ experience of love. Furthermore, love is influenced by culture; research suggests that romantic beliefs vary between individualistic and collectivistic societies (Dion & Dion, 1996). Cultural values appear to shape both the meaning attributed to love and its function in promoting long-term commitment, cooperation, and relational stability between partners. In this sense, cultural norms and values influence how love is experienced.

Conclusion

Forgiveness, love, and relationship satisfaction are important parts of romantic relationships and are vital to understanding how close bonds are experienced and upheld over time. These variables reflect factors that are important in romantic relationships, including conflict management, the development of emotional closeness, and individuals’ overall evaluations of their relationships. As such, they are useful when exploring the quality and psychological importance of partnerships.

In the present research, these variables are particularly relevant because they can change with time and personal growth. Psychotherapy has the potential to influence emotional regulation, self-understanding, and attachment, all of which may shape how individuals experience love and forgiveness and evaluate relationship satisfaction. By distinguishing between relationships in which neither, one, or both partners have engaged in psychotherapy, this study will address an important gap in the literature by linking individual therapeutic experience to everyday relationships rather than just to clinical outcomes. This could highlight unintentional knock-on effects of psychotherapy.

More broadly, forgiveness, love, and relationship satisfaction are central to human experience. They influence well-being, relationship stability, and the ability to maintain meaningful long-term relationships. These processes are all shaped by cultural norms surrounding intimacy, emotional expression, and attitudes toward psychotherapy. Examining these variables across diverse European contexts, therefore, allows for a better understanding of how cultural factors interact with personal and relational processes. In the future, this could allow cultural adaptations of psychotherapy forms which acknowledge the role of culture.

Overall, this research advances the understanding of romantic relationships as dynamic systems shaped by individual development, everyday relationships, and cultural context, with meaningful implications for both psychological research and psychotherapeutic practice. So, while Valentine’s Day has already passed, perhaps you should pay a little more attention to how your or your loved ones’ experiences with psychotherapy could be influencing your relationship.

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About the Authors

“The Role of Psychotherapy in Romantic Relationship Dynamics: A Cross-European Study” is part of EFPSA’s Research Programme 2025/2026 under the supervision of Zoi A. Polyzopoulou (Greece, Iowa State University). The team consists of Senanur Akburak (Türkiye, Istanbul University), Ali Güvenç Güngör (Turkey, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences), Sofia Konstantinidou (Greece, Erasmus University Rotterdam), Beeatriz Cardoso Silva (Portugal, University of Beira Interior), Sofia Tsvetanova Veselinova (Bulgaria, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) and Emma L. Wood (UK, University of Vienna). You can contact them at researchoffice@efpsa.org or zoipolyzopoulou5@gmail.com for questions, concerns, or feedback about the project.