Highlights
- All long-term relationships experience stress. What makes the difference for thriving marriages? A together approach. Post This
- Couples who develop "together" approaches, rather than "individual" approaches, fare much better under stress. Post This
- The biggest threats to marriages reported by couples in our study: death or illness of a child, infidelity, and mental illness in one’s spouse. Post This
Infidelity, mental illness, and financial pressures can spell the end to many marriages, but how do thriving couples overcome these threats? How do they stand united while others fall apart? Our new study sheds light on these questions and highlights an important principle to keep relationships resilient.
The main reasons for divorce include a lack of commitment, an affair, too much conflict, financial pressure, substance abuse, and partner violence. But many couples face at least some of these issues in a long-term marriage, and some couples manage to work through them. As a psychiatrist, I’ve (Christian) seen couples find commitment after lacking it, be stronger after an affair or marital conflict, and even rebound from financial ruin. But how? The answer may be found in our new study.
We asked 180 coupled individuals in resilient relationships of 40+ years from 42 countries about the big stressors that threatened to ruin their marriage. We also asked how they overcome these stressors to stay together. We found a strong underlying pattern in how these couples coped.
These were the biggest threats to their marriages: death or illness of a child, infidelity, and mental illness in one’s spouse.
Many of these issues are cited as major contributors to divorce. The important question is how the resilient couples in our study coped, which we illustrate in the figure below.
The top five coping mechanisms—communicate well, draw closer as a couple, persevere together, prioritize the relationship, and sacrifice individual wants—were "together" coping mechanisms; they leaned inward towards the relationship, rather than employed individual approaches. Together, they encompassed 70% of all coping mechanisms reported and altogether 83% leant inwards as together-coping mechanisms. Another 11.6% could be interpreted as together or individual mechanisms, and only 5.4% (3 of the 17) engaged in behaviors like slamming doors, agreeing on a short separation, and being patient—which were definitely not together coping mechanisms.
The study also discussed how the brain chemical oxytocin, which mediates feelings of love and togetherness, initiates a biological cascade in the brain to make us physically and mentally more resilient.
What’s the One Take-Home Finding For Troubled Couples?
The main message is that couples who develop "together" approaches, rather than "individual" approaches, fare much better under stress. Leaning inward towards the relationship seems to strengthen a couple’s underlying togetherness—their attachment—by releasing more oxytocin to make each person more resilient. Individual approaches, it is theorized, do not strengthen the underlying togetherness.
All long-term relationships experience stress. Our study supports the idea that stress “well-negotiated in one relationship may be the death-knell of another,” and that stressors, as unwelcome as they are, “could bring couples closer” if dealt with effectively. What makes the difference? A together approach that involves leaning inward towards the relationship.
Coping together under stress then feeling more togetherness become a positive feedback loop: overcome adversity together, feel like you belong together more, increase your resilience, overcome more adversity together, feel like you belong together even more, and so on. Together, you strengthen each other. As previous studies show, this leads to longer-lasting relationships.1
Developing a together approach, however, involves self-sacrifice, a term that has little currency today. Self-sacrifice entails nurturing the relationship above self and valuing staying together. This, we speculate, helped these couples choose together rather than individual coping mechanisms. Sacrifice activates our care-giving system to enable us to fulfil a spouse’s needs, protect them, and foster their growth, as well as our own. After a while, it is gladly done, to lessen the sacrifice.
Our study shows what needs to go right in a relationship to succeed rather than what needs to be avoided. It suggests that personal sacrifice in a relationship is self-serving as it leads to a longer, stronger relationship with the promise of more individual fulfilment, personal growth, and resilience. It suggests that some wisdom of the ages reflects reality: two heads are better than one, it is as good to give as to receive, and united we stand, divided we fall.
Christian Heim is a clinical psychiatrist and senior lecturer at The University of Queensland. Caroline Heim is an Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
1. See Falconier, M. K., Jackson, J. B., Hilpert, P., & Bodenmann, G. (2015). Dyadic coping and relationship satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 42, 28–46. Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1994). Attachment as an organizational framework for research on close relationships. Psychological Inquiry, 5(1), 1–22. Skerrett, K. (2015). Resilience in couples: A view of the landscape. In Skerrett, K., & Fergus, K. (Eds.), Couple resilience emerging perspectives (1st ed.; pp. 3–22). Springer.
