The field of psychology and pop psychology has spent a great deal of time and energy focusing on conflict resolution. There are many books and workshops that teach couples how to talk to each other during conflict and how to resolve it, how to prevent it and how to think about it while you are having it. This focus on conflict and conflict resolution is great - it gives us much-needed tools and couples a way to grow and become more intimate from conflict. Research over the past several decades shows that what happens during conflict matters - it effects the relationship and the people in it.
Recently, researchers have taken our examination of relationship conflict a step in another direction: by looking at what happens after the conflict is over. In a newly published study out of the University of Minnesota, Salvatore and her colleagues studied how well members of a couple recovered from conflict and found that in fact this matters too.
The researchers defined "recovery conflict" as the ability to not "let remnants of the conflict spill over or leak into other parts of the relationship" or into other interactions. What they found was that the ability to recover well from conflict predicted higher satisfaction and more favorable relationship perceptions. In other words, being able to let the conflict go and achieve closeness swiftly created more general positive feelings about the relationship and more satisfaction in it.
