How Whining and Sulking Can Damage a Relationship

Direct and indirect support seeking

Suppose you are struggling with an emotional issue and need support from your romantic partner. What do you do? You may use indirect support seeking. This means you do not disclose the source of the problem, but use passive, subtle, and indirect methods of communicating your unhappiness—sulking, sighing, whining, fidgeting, showing sadness, etc. Another option is direct support seeking, which is asking for support in a straightforward manner, describing the source of the problem, and requesting help in finding solutions.

Does indirect support seeking work? Often not, according to an article published in the July issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. This article, which I review here today, examines why people in romantic relationships use indirect support seeking, and how doing so elicits negative reactions in potential support providers.¹

Before examining the article, let us learn a little more about social support, and then examine the nature of support seeking in healthy relationships.

Social support, which overlaps with emotional support as well, can be provided by friends, co-workers, family, relatives, and also by one’s romantic partner—boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, etc. Especially during times when we feel overwhelmed by our problems to the extent that we begin to question our personal worth, social support can be invaluable and help us feel loved and valued once again.

People may seek social support indirectly or directly. Romantic partners typically respond to indirect support seeking by providing negative support—invalidating, criticizing, or blaming the support seeker. Romantic partners are more likely to provide an appropriate supportive response to direct support seeking.

Source: gabrielle_cc/Pixabay

What are healthy relationships like?

According to research, direct (compared to indirect) support seeking often results in positive and higher-quality emotional support. So why do many of us still seek support indirectly from our significant other?

To understand the reasons for this, we must remember people desire connection and support but hate rejection. The problem is that the behaviors characteristic of many healthy relationships—behaviors that help us meet our need for connection and belonging—involve substantial risk (including the risk of rejection).

Consider how individuals in healthy relationships behave: They “disclose self-doubts to their partner,” seek “social support for personal weaknesses that could elicit rejection,” and “respond to their partner’s needs as they arise and leave the timing of repayment up to the partner.” In short, those in supportive relationships “behave in ways that give a partner power over their outcomes and emotions” (p. 641).²

Building an emotionally supportive relationship, then, involves emotional risks. People who have low self-esteem are less willing to take such risks. To reduce the risk of being rejected, they do not allow themselves to be vulnerable. However, being overly concerned with self-protection will make building healthy relationships difficult. In attempting to defend themselves against potential rejection, these individuals ironically reinforce their negative self-views and amplify their sense of vulnerability.

This last point becomes more clear as we examine the article in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin—authored by Brian Don, Yuthika Girme, and Matthew Hammond.

Investigating support seeking in romantic relationships

Participants in the main study mentioned in the article were 76 couples (average age of 20 years; 83 percent white and 11 percent African American) who had been in monogamous relationships for an average of 1.5 years.¹

The couples completed a variety of assessments, listed below. I have also included sample items from the assessments (these items are placed in parentheses):

• Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (“I feel like a person who has a number of good qualities”)
• Revised Adult Attachment Scale (“I often worry that romantic partners don’t really love me”)
• Relatedness Need Satisfaction Subscale (“When I am with my romantic partner, I feel a lot of closeness and intimacy”)
• Perceived Partner Responsiveness Scale (“My partner is aware of what I am thinking and feeling”) (p. 4-5)¹

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Another assessment, the Perceived Partner Responsiveness Scale, was administered only after the following task: The members of each couple were asked to discuss with their significant other something about themselves they would like to change. This discussion was video-recorded and later examined for instances of indirect support-seeking behavior (e.g., showing weakness or making one’s partner feel guilty) and negative support behavior provided (e.g., use of criticism and blame).

A statistical analysis of the data supported the researchers’ conceptual model (discussed below) concerning the negative effects of indirect support seeking.

A replication study provided further (but partial) evidence in favor of the researchers’ model. A meta-analysis of the two investigations, however, concluded that the main paths in the model were all statistically significant.

Let us review the researchers’ conceptual model (see Figure 1):

Source: Arash Emamzadeh (adapted from Don et al. 2019)

Individuals who have low self-esteem have a tendency to use indirect means of seeking emotional support (Path A); this often results in the individual receiving negative support from their partner. For instance, the partner withdraws, blames, invalidates, and makes the support-seeking individual feel vulnerable, abandoned, and rejected (Path B). In short, people low in self-esteem end up eliciting negative support (Path C), which is the very thing they wanted to avoid.

Lastly, consider the model’s Path D, located between the actual support given and the perception of the support-giving partner’s responsiveness. Path D, too, is affected by the level of self-esteem in the individual seeking emotional support: Support-seekers with lower self-esteem perceive a lower level of responsiveness in their partner.

Implications for seeking and providing support

Social support/emotional support is an essential source of feelings of value, esteem, and belonging.

To receive high-quality support, we must allow ourselves to feel vulnerable, so we sometimes need to give our partner the power to determine if and when we shall receive the care we value highly. This willingness to be vulnerable requires trust—something that those with low self-esteem find hard to establish. Nevertheless, the findings reviewed today suggest that indirect support seeking is often less successful than direct support seeking and more likely to result in receiving negative support (withdrawal, blame).

Therefore, by owning their need for support and asking for help directly, individuals with low self-esteem might find more satisfaction. Indirect support seeking may seem like a shortcut, but in reality, it might be more of a dead-end.

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