Let’s start with the obvious: if you feel like your partner holds all the cards—whether or not they actually do—your relationship might not feel so dreamy.

And thanks to a large new study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, we now have data to back up what therapists have been watching for decades: relationship satisfaction is less about how much power you hold, and more about how much power you think your partner has.

But this isn’t your grandma’s relationship research.

Led by Eleanor Junkins and colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, this study pulls the thread on the old, straight, heteronormative fabric of power dynamics in love and weaves in something much more expansive: diverse identities, relationship structures, and nuanced personality variables.

It’s time to retire the idea that power in relationships is just about who earns more money or who gets to control the remote. Turns out, the truth is far messier—and far more interesting.

In a culture where we’re told to “marry your best friend,” it’s surprising how few people actually do.

According to a 2024 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, only 14.4% of adults in committed romantic relationships in the U.S. identified their partner as their best friend.

The rest? Either they called someone else their best friend—or didn’t include their partner as a “friend” at all.

That’s not a failure of romance. It might be a quiet revolution.