When Forgiving Your Partner Backfires

"What you tolerate, you teach" gets shared because it feels true. Researchers have tested a version of it, and the results are more interesting than the quote.

What happens the day after you forgive

James McNulty (2010) asked 135 newlywed couples to keep a daily diary for a week. Each day, spouses recorded whether their partner had done something negative and whether they forgave it. The analysis focused on 165 people who were upset with their spouse one day and then described the spouse's behavior the next.

People who forgave were nearly twice as likely to report that their partner misbehaved again the next day. Most of the offenses were ordinary, such as disagreements, nagging, and inconsiderate moments.

McNulty's explanation comes from basic learning theory. Criticism, guilt, and a cold shoulder are unpleasant. Forgiveness removes them, along with the reason to stop.

A later study followed couples for four years and found a similar pattern with more serious behavior. Spouses who tended to forgive saw their partners' psychological and physical aggression hold steady, while less forgiving spouses saw it decline (McNulty, 2011).

It depends on who you're forgiving

Across four studies, forgiveness predicted less repeat offending from agreeable people and more from less agreeable people (McNulty & Russell, 2016). Agreeable people tend to feel guilty and want to repair things. For less agreeable people, forgiveness seems to lower the cost of doing it again.

Satisfaction splits the same way. People married to partners who rarely behaved badly stayed happier over time when they were more forgiving. People married to partners who often behaved badly became less happy the more they forgave (McNulty, 2008).

What forgiveness costs the person doing it

Luchies et al. (2010) ran four studies, including one that followed married couples for five years.

Forgiving a partner who made amends supported self-respect. Forgiving a partner who did not make amends wore it down. The authors called it the doormat effect.

Saying something works, slowly

If tolerance teaches the wrong lesson, what teaches a better one? Overall et al. (2009) videotaped 61 couples trying to get each other to change. Direct requests, both warm and blunt, looked unsuccessful during the conversation. A year later, partners who heard them reported changing more than partners who got hints or indirect pressure.

Keeping quiet has its own cost. In a daily diary study, people who hid their feelings while making sacrifices for a partner had lower well-being and relationship quality. Both partners reported the drop (Impett et al., 2012).

Where the quote gets it wrong

"What you tolerate, you teach" assumes your partner is a student waiting for instructions. Some people learn from forgiveness that they hurt you and want to do better. Others learn the hurt is free. The research points to a more useful question than how much to tolerate: what does your partner usually do after being forgiven?

References

Impett, E. A., Kogan, A., English, T., John, O., Oveis, C., Gordon, A. M., & Keltner, D. (2012). Suppression sours sacrifice: Emotional and relational costs of suppressing emotions in romantic relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(6), 707–720.

Luchies, L. B., Finkel, E. J., McNulty, J. K., & Kumashiro, M. (2010). The doormat effect: When forgiving erodes self-respect and self-concept clarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(5), 734–749.

McNulty, J. K. (2008). Forgiveness in marriage: Putting the benefits into context. Journal of Family Psychology, 22(1), 171–175.

McNulty, J. K. (2010). Forgiveness increases the likelihood of subsequent partner transgressions in marriage. Journal of Family Psychology, 24(6), 787–790.

McNulty, J. K. (2011). The dark side of forgiveness: The tendency to forgive predicts continued psychological and physical aggression in marriage. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(6), 770–783.

McNulty, J. K., & Russell, V. M. (2016). Forgive and forget, or forgive and regret? Whether forgiveness leads to less or more offending depends on offender agreeableness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(5), 616–631.

Overall, N. C., Fletcher, G. J. O., Simpson, J. A., & Sibley, C. G. (2009). Regulating partners in intimate relationships: The costs and benefits of different communication strategies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(3), 620–639.

Title choice: in a study of over 105,000 headlines, each extra negative word raised click-through by 2.3%, while positive words lowered it. "Backfires" is the negative word doing that work here.

The four-year aggression finding (McNulty, 2011) and the satisfaction split (McNulty, 2008) come from what I know of those papers rather than this search. Check those two abstracts before you publish.