Over Sixties to talk about love

Originally published in SIN Newspaper, NUIGalway's University Newspaper.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, for one NUI Galway student it’s the perfect opportunity to ask the over sixties to tell her about love.

Kate Burke is a doctoral student at National University of Ireland, Galway who wants to examine the importance of romantic relationships for people over the age of 60.  “We are hoping to identify the most important elements of successful romantic relationships, and how these factors influence one another”.

Kate, who is a Trainee Clinical Psychologist and is carrying out her research under the supervision of Dr. Michael Hogan, Lecturer in Psychology at NUI Galway, has created a questionnaire and ideally needs around 200 people to participate. As well as being over 60, participants should also either be in a romantic relationship or have been in a relationship within the last 10 years.

Successful romantic relationships are recognised as being beneficial for psychological wellbeing and physical health. Communication, intimacy, sex and love have been found to be important in relationship satisfaction; however this research is usually completed with younger couples.

“Older adults are largely neglected when it comes to this kind of research”, with the focus being on younger people and newlyweds. However, I think older people have a lot of experience and can offer a different perspective that younger people can’t.”

Kate has already carried out some in-depth research with a group of younger people, and older people. Using a collective intelligence methodology some stark differences were identified between the focus groups

“So far, in testing this research area, we think that older people see honesty as being the fundamental driver of all other elements of successful romantic relationships,” Kate told us, Honesty is an interesting concept as it involves self-disclosure and risks putting an individual in a vulnerable position, and yet the ability to disclose honestly can facilitate a deeper level of intimacy in the relationship.”

For younger adults, communication and trust significantly enhance all elements of relationship success. Older adults also acknowledged the importance of these while both groups identified intimacy as an important component of relationship success.

“The survey will hopefully build on our previous findings and provide some statistical information about this interesting topic, allowing us to learn more about what’s important in loving relationships for older people. It would be great if people could share their experience with us.”

Those who wish to participate in the online study should log onto https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MBNJ9CL . All participants’ data will be kept confidential with no identifying information attached to the questionnaires.