Romantic partners use texting to send a variety of messages including relational maintenance messages. Three hundred forty-one individuals in dating relationships completed a questionnaire about texted relational maintenance messages, relational variables, relational texting frequency, and their proclivity for texting romantic partners. Four maintenance strategies—positivity, assurances, sharing tasks, and network—were significantly related to relational satisfaction and closeness. Romantic texting proclivity contributed positively to relational satisfaction and closeness through maintenance but contributed negatively to satisfaction and closeness after controlling for the effects of texted maintenance.
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McEwan et al. (2016) studied this question.
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