Love Me Inside Out: A Qualitative Investigation of Body and Appearance Valuation in Romantic Relationships and Potential for Objectification

The purpose of the present research was to investigate how objectification manifests in romantic relationships and its determining features. Despite abundant literature on sexual objectification, there are few studies about body and appearance valuation between romantic partners. Therefore, we aimed to identify concrete behavioral exemplars of how objectification manifests and is interpreted in the context of romantic relationships. Likewise, we sought to determine whether certain instances of body and appearance valuation can be benign (or even adaptive) in this context. In a phone interview we asked about the extent to which participants felt their current romantic partner valued them more for their body and appearance than for their internal attributes. We then conducted a thematic analysis of 247 of these responses, resulting in three overarching themes that suggest a tension between the desire to be seen as human and the gendered pressure to be seen as attractive. Our themes provide valuable insight about what constitutes objectification between one romantic partner and another, while exploring potentially benign or constructive implications of non-objectifying body and appearance valuation. Critically, we situate our analysis within cisheteropatriarchy and discuss gendered patterns in our results.