THAT'S MEN:Time to haul yourself out of the habit trap, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
DO YOU WANT your spouse to purr? If so, dish out lots of confidence-boosting talk and cut back on the advice.
That’s according to research reported in the Journal of Family Psychology. More than 100 couples were surveyed for the research during the five years after they married. The researchers aimed to find out what sort of support works best in a marriage and what works least.
It appears that if you want to please your spouse you should try to give him or her lots of so-called “esteem support”. This means encouraging them, building up their confidence and boosting them generally.
The least effective type of support, which could actually harm the relationship, was what the researchers called “informational support”. This includes telling your partner how to fix problems, what to do next and so on – being a bit of a know-all in other words.
These findings are included in a useful article on the website of the ToDo Institute (todoinstitute.com) on helpful findings from marriage research. Most of the research was done in the US but seems to me to be very applicable to Irish couples.
One piece of research, the Early Years of Marriagestudy, followed 373 couples married in 1986 for a period of 16 years.
The findings on conflict were particularly interesting. In all, 29 per cent of husbands and 21 per cent of wives said they had no conflict in the first year of their marriage. The figures suggest some wives were in conflict with husbands who didn’t know there was anything amiss. Still, they suggest that the honeymoon period lasts for longer than the more cynical of us expect.
But I’m afraid it doesn’t go on forever. Sixteen years later, almost half the couples had divorced. And those who had no conflicts in year one seem to have been just as likely as anyone else to experience the pain of separation.
That study identified a pattern which is particularly damaging to marriages. It is one that I have mentioned here before and it is very familiar to relationship counsellors.
In this pattern, one partner wants to discuss problems and sort them out but the other partner retreats, withdraws, and will have nothing to do with any such exercise.
It is very likely that the person who withdraws is scared of the conflict, perhaps for childhood reasons that have nothing to do with the conflict itself. It is very difficult for that partner to change his or her ways, but without change the result can be the end of the marriage or else much unhappiness.
What of marriages that last but become tired and stale over the years? We’ve often heard that the answer is to somehow bring novelty into the relationship.
That’s all very well but how the heck are you to do that? Do you both have to take up parachute jumping or mountain climbing?
Actually, according to Prof Arthur Aron at the State University of New York, it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. Even going to a new restaurant will activate the brain’s reward system and get everybody smiling again. The brain likes pleasant new experiences.
The challenge, I fear, is to avoid the extremely strong lure of the familiar. It’s so easy to go to the same cinema, the same restaurant, sit in the same chair, watch the same soaps, do the same activities on holiday, have the same conversations about the same things, and then wonder where the spark has gone.
But if you’re willing to haul yourself out of the habit trap, and if your partner is willing to do the same, then the reward could be a new sense of romance in the relationship.
As these pieces of research show, making relationships better can sometimes be a fairly simple matter. So, unfortunately, can making relationships worse.
You can find the ToDo Institute article by typing “todoinstitute.com marriage research you can use” into a search engine (without the quotation marks).
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail