With or Without You? People Feel Less Autonomous During Social Interactions, Except with Romantic Partners

Social interaction bolsters well-being and fulfills fundamental relatedness needs. However, less is known about potential costs of social interaction, such as loss of autonomy. We test a potential relatedness–autonomy tradeoff by comparing feelings of connectedness and autonomy when people were socially interacting versus not. College student participants completed experience sampling method self-reports (N = 352, 10,046 observations) of their momentary social interactions, feelings of social connectedness, autonomy, and positive affect. We found that people report lower autonomy when interacting with others compared to when alone. This is especially true for people with higher levels of trait attachment avoidance. Importantly, interaction partner matters: People report higher autonomy during interactions with romantic partners compared to when alone. These findings provide ecologically valid evidence for a tradeoff between relatedness and autonomy during social interactions with non-romantic others, but show that relatedness and autonomy go hand in hand during interactions with romantic partners.