When negative feelings accumulate in a relationship, it can become a problem.
Couples are often poor at knowing when their partner is sad, lonely or a little down, research finds.
Instead couples tend to assume their partner feels the same way as they do.
Asking “How are you feeling?” and working on ’empathic accuracy’ could improve the relationship.
Dr Chrystyna Kouros, who led the study, said:
“We found that when it comes to the normal ebb and flow of daily emotions, couples aren’t picking up on those occasional changes in ‘soft negative’ emotions like sadness or feeling down.
They might be missing important emotional clues.”
Misreading your partner
The results come from a study of 51 couples who kept daily dairies about their moods and those of their partner.
By comparing them, researchers were able to see how accurate each person was at empathising with the other.
The results showed that the relatively subtle ups and downs were hard to identify.
In contrast, strong positive or negative feelings were easy for partners to spot.
Dr Kouros said:
“Failing to pick up on negative feelings one or two days is not a big deal.
But if this accumulates, then down the road it could become a problem for the relationship.
It’s these missed opportunities to be offering support or talking it out that can compound over time to negatively affect a relationship.”
Empathic accuracy
Sadness and loneliness were particularly difficult to read, the researchers found.
Dr Kouros said:
“With empathic accuracy you’re relying on clues from your partner to figure out their mood.
Assumed similarity, on the other hand, is when you just assume your partner feels the same way you do.
Sometimes you might be right, because the two of you actually do feel the same, but not because you were really in tune with your partner.”
Asking “How do you feel?” all the time quickly gets irritating, but a little communication can’t hurt.
Dr Kouros said:
“I suggest couples put a little more effort into paying attention to their partner — be more mindful and in the moment when you are with your partner.
Obviously you could take it too far.
If you sense that your partner’s mood is a little different than usual, you can just simply ask how their day was, or maybe you don’t even bring it up, you just say instead ‘Let me pick up dinner tonight’ or ‘I’ll put the kids to bed tonight.’
If there’s something you want to talk about, then communicate that.
It’s a two-way street.
It’s not just your partner’s responsibility.”
The study was published in the journal Family Process (Kouros et al., 2018).
