Romeo and Juliet Effect

The Romeo and Juliet effect is the proposed pattern in which a couple's romantic feelings intensify when their parents or families oppose the relationship, named for Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers. The actor and director Richard Driscoll coined the term and, with Keith Davis and Milton Lipetz, published a 1972 longitudinal study of 140 couples that measured love, trust, neediness and perceived parental interference at two points six to twelve months apart, finding that greater parental interference was associated with higher reported love even as it was also associated with lower trust and more frequent conflict between partners. The finding has not held up well since: Driscoll's original study has never been replicated, and later research, including work by Malcolm Parks in 1983, has largely failed to find support for the effect, so it is best treated as a well known but empirically contested claim rather than an established finding.