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Key points
- Giving and receiving timely and quality support are important parts of building and maintaining healthy romantic relationships.
- Research suggests husbands who feel stressed are less likely to notice their wives’ need for support and to provide support.
- Spouses might benefit from learning to identify the subtle signs of stress in themselves and signs of a need for support in their partners.
Providing support for one’s romantic partner is very important. But not easy. To provide quality support, one needs to pay careful attention, recognize signs of the need for support, provide the right kind of support, and do so in a timely and sensitive way.
Noticing another’s need for support and the ability to provide support is made difficult by a variety of factors; chief among them are mental health issues (e.g., anxiety, depression) and psychological stress.
Indeed, stress, particularly chronic stress, not only affects our physical and mental health (see this diagram on responses to stress), but it also affects our ability to provide support to our partners, as a new study by Neff and colleagues suggests.
The study, which examined the effects of stress on support in romantic relationships (specifically, marriage), concluded that stress affects both the awareness of the need for support and the actual provision of support. The findings, published in the November 2021 issue Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, are summarized below.
Investigating the link between support and stress in marriage
Participants: 121 newlywed couples.
Eligibility criteria: first marriage, lasting less than six months, and no children.
Sample characteristics: Men were 29 years of age, on average; 78% White; 52% with a bachelor’s degree and 9% with a master’s degree; 78% employed full-time. Women were 27 years of age, on average; 76% White; 57% with bachelor’s degree and 14% with master’s degree; 70% employed full-time.
Couples were instructed to complete various questionnaires and a 14-day diary survey. These assessments were repeated twice in the following two years.
A key measure was the UCLA Life Stress Interview, used to assess chronic stress related to different life domains, such as finances, work, health, and romantic relationships. The daily diary measures evaluated daily stress, perceptions of partners’ support needs, perceptions of own support needs, and actual support provision to one’s spouse.
The effects of stress on support provision in marriage
As noted in the introduction, before providing support, one must first recognize their romantic partner’s need for support. And the results showed chronically stressed husbands were less likely to accurately perceive day-to-day changes in their wives’ need for support.
The data also revealed a difference between chronic stress and daily stress:
Chronic stress moderated husbands’ perceptions of their romantic partners’ need for support. Daily stress, however, did not. This was unexpected, as daily or acute stress (e.g., traffic) tends to reduce perspective-taking. So, why didn’t daily stress affect perceptions of the need for support?
One explanation is that even if high stress temporarily prevents couples from tuning in to each other and reading the cues of need for support, married couples likely know each other’s feelings and thoughts well enough. In other words, despite daily hassles, spouses may not lose perspective on what their romantic partners need.
This is not the case with chronic stress. Over time, chronic stress gradually exhausts the man’s energy and mental resources—and thus impairs his ability to identify the support needs of his wife.
Here is another important finding: Regardless of differences in perceptions of support needs, chronically stressed husbands were less likely to provide support. The link between a husband’s perceptions of his wife’s support needs and actual support provision was moderated by daily stress. Specifically, on “days when husbands perceived their partner needed more support, they provided less support if they were experiencing greater levels of their own stress that day.”
Last, the effects of stress on support were present mainly for husbands and not for their wives. This finding agrees with previous research on sex differences in the effects of stress on empathic responding.
How to support your romantic partner
One of the benefits of being in a romantic relationship is receiving instrumental and emotional support from someone who knows you very well and cares about you deeply.
However, as the above findings show, sometimes partners can be too stressed to notice each other’s need for support; and sometimes they may not have the knowledge, energy, or resources to provide quality support in a timely and sensitive manner.
Indeed, failing to provide support could be one reason why couples who lead stressful lives (e.g., low income, economic hardship) experience lower marital well-being and relationship stability.
So, what interventions might help chronically stressed husbands (or wives)? Interventions that aim to do the following:
- To teach couples how to identify subtle signs of their significant other’s need for support. Note, a person in need of support may not always directly ask for support. Individuals with low self-esteem, in particular, are more likely to use indirect support seeking (e.g., complaining, alluding to a problem without asking for assistance).
- To teach support providers how to identify signs of stress in themselves. This is an essential requirement for providing support during stressful periods. For instance, only a man who is aware that he is experiencing tension (and aware of the way his worries and anxieties affect his ability to pay attention) will make the extra effort to check in with his wife regularly during times of stress.
- To help couples manage their stress more effectively by providing them with the right tools. Some examples are problem-solving skills (see the last section of the article linked) and stress-management techniques (e.g., body scan, guided imagery, mindfulness practices, relaxation training).
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