Stress, as family researchers know, is bad for couples. When couples face demands outside of their relationship, we know that they are more likely to report problems within the relationship, more likely to experience declines in satisfaction over time, and quicker to dissolve their relationship entirely. Moreover, we know that this holds true for all kinds of stress, including chronic illness in family members, financial strain, poverty, and even daily hassles. The research literature is clear and consistent on this point: when stress happens, couples suffer.     

But not everyone believes this. Ask a layperson about relationships and you sometimes get a different perspective, as I did several years back during a routine visit to my optometrist. He asked what I do for a living, and after hearing that I research marriages, he told me about his own marriage and why he believed it had been so strong for so long. Shortly after their wedding, his wife was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer requiring a debilitating round of treatments. It was an awful and difficult time for both of them, but she survived. The cancer went into remission and stayed there, and the two of them proceeded to have a long and happy marriage. "So you see," he explained to me, "the key to having a strong marriage is experiencing stress. The way we figure it, after beating cancer, we knew just how much we could depend on each other. After that, the rest was easy."

I did not argue with him, even though his conclusion contradicted everything that my own research and that of my colleagues had revealed about the effects of stress on relationships. Empirical evidence for the positive effects of stress on couples or marriages is exceedingly hard to find, yet outside the research literature, popular culture is full of stories of couples and families who come together over stress, developing closer bonds through the process of overcoming serious challenges.

How can we reconcile these two ideas? What does my optometrist know that the empirical literature on stress and couples has been missing?

Why Stress Usually Is Bad For Couples

The problem with stressful events is that they demand a response. When a child gets ill, someone has to take that child to the doctor. When the car breaks down, someone has to get that car repaired, and in the meantime someone has to find another way to get to work. Our responses to these events, whether they are adaptive or maladaptive, take time and energy. This affects couples because the activities required for maintaining an intimate relationship also take time and energy. Communicating effectively, managing conflict, expressing empathy: all of these processes are central to lasting intimacy, but none is easy. All else being equal, more time spent dealing with stress leaves less time to spend on a relationship.

Over the past several years, Lisa Neff and I have documented two specific ways that stressful events occurring outside of a relationship interfere with couples' ability to maintain an intimate bond within the relationship (Neff & Karney, 2004, 2009). First, stress outside the relationship changes what couples need to talk about and the time available to talk about it. Despite our best efforts, there are only 24 hours in a day. Time that couples spend deciding how they are going to cut back to get their bills paid, or negotiating who is going to take off work to care for a sick relative, is time that is not spent on other activities, like having sex or participating in shared interests, that are more likely to promote closeness. As a consequence, couples are likely to perceive more unresolved problems within the relationship during periods when they are facing especially high demands outside of the relationship.

Second, at the same time that stress gives couples more difficult issues to resolve, stress diminishes the capacity of couples to resolve their issues effectively. In our labs, we have documented this effect by showing that the same couples who are perfectly capable of effective relationship maintenance when times are good (e.g., they tend to forgive each other, they avoid making big issues out of small ones) become significantly less able to engage in these adaptive processes after periods of stress. And the same couples do better at relationship maintenance again after their stresses alleviate. We are not the only ones who have shown this. Rand Conger and his colleagues have demonstrated how financial stress in particular affects marital outcomes through its direct negative effects on the way couples communicate (e.g., Conger & Conger, 2008). Ashley Randall, Guy Bodenmann and their team have made the same point experimentally, showing that couples who are randomly assigned to stress exposure interact less effectively, as assessed through observational coding of their communication, than couples assigned to a no-stress control condition (as described in Randall & Bodenmann, 2009).

Stress in the Context of Other Stressors

Given these effects, encountering any single stressor is likely, on average, to be associated with more negative outcomes for couples. But the picture is more complicated than that, because couples do not encounter individual stressors in isolation. Rather, as Reuben Hill (1949) first pointed out in his classic and influential Family Stress Theory, the impact of any specific stressor on a relationship is likely to depend on the broader landscape of additional stressors the couple faces and the resources available to cope with them. Having to take the car in for repairs is considerably easier for a couple that has two cars, or jobs with flexible hours, than for a couple dependent on a single car, or employed in strict 9-to-5 jobs. An unexpected expense means something different for a couple with flexible income than for a couple already struggling to make ends meet.

Recognizing that the effects of an identical stressor may differ depending on the broader circumstances of a couple suggests that the statement "stress is bad for couples" is likely to be an oversimplification. Instead, Hill's model invites us to make the more nuanced statement: "Stress is likely to be bad for couples who lack the resources to cope with stress effectively." And the implied inverse may also be true: "Stress may not be so bad for couples with adequate resources."

In our longitudinal studies of newlywed couples, we have evaluated the evidence for these ideas by examining the interactions between the specific, acute stressors that couples encounter and the chronic conditions of couples' lives (Karney, Story, & Bradbury, 2005). Over the early years of marriage, we found that wives' marital satisfaction tends to covary negatively with the level of acute stress they are experiencing outside of the relationship. That is, wives are less happy than usual after periods of relatively high stress, and more happy than usual after periods of relatively low stress. But the strength of this relationship depends on the broader set of chronic circumstances that wives are facing. Acute stress in the context of chronic stress (i.e., lasting health problems, financial strain, unsatisfying or intermittent employment) is especially powerfully associated with changes in wives' marital satisfaction. In the context of low chronic stress, however, fluctuations in acute stress are not significantly associated with changes in marital satisfaction at all. Couples whose lives are generally good and rich in support may endure ups and downs in acute stress without their marital satisfaction being affected.

This line of thinking can help us to answer the question: When might couples actually benefit from stress? As Hill (1949) originally proposed, facing a challenge together may bring family members closer as long as families possess adequate resources to address the challenge successfully.

In our most recent work, we have been examining this idea in the context of work-family conflict (van Steenbergen, Kluwer, & Karney, under review). The demands of work are often described as toxic to family life. Indeed they are toxic for many working couples, those for whom each hour spent at work drains away time and energy, leaving less behind to devote toward maintaining the relationship. But this need not be true for all couples. We reasoned that high demands at work might benefit some couples, as long as those couples possessed sufficient resources for maintaining their relationships when work was done. To address this possibility, we examined how associations between fluctuating workload and changes in relationship satisfaction might be moderated by how satisfied partners were with their jobs, and by whether or not couples had children. We found that a high workload, measured by agreement with items like "It is the sort of workload that people have nightmares about," was associated with increases in satisfaction for people who liked their jobs and who were not parents. These were the couples with adequate resources to manage the demands of work and of their relationships at the same time. Fulfilled by their jobs, long hours for them represented time well spent and an investment in a promising future. In the absence of other demanding roles to fill, they returned from work capable of spending time with partners who appreciated their devotion to their careers. As might be expected, these effects were stronger for husbands' work than for wives'.

The parents' data told a totally different story. Whereas childless wives were more satisfied in marriages to husbands who spent long hours in jobs that fulfilled them, mothers were significantly less satisfied during periods when their husbands had a higher workload, and this was especially true when husbands were satisfied with their jobs. Why such a difference between parents and nonparents? To a wife without children, time her husband spends at work is time spent investing their shared financial future. To a wife with children, however, that same time is time that she is left alone taking care of those children, and this issue is rather more salient than the distant promise of more money in the bank years from now. The parents, juggling not only work and relationship but also the additional demands of caring for their children, had fewer resources left over to maintain their relationships effectively during periods of high workload.

Stress is a Test: It Helps When You Pass

In other words, the experience of stress is a test. All else being equal, most of us would probably prefer not to face this test. After all, being tested means having an opportunity to fail, and this is why, on average, stress is still associated with negative outcomes for couples. For couples with few resources or other vulnerabilities, the demands of stress may overwhelm their capacity to respond effectively, and these are the times when such couples are likely to suffer in ways that might have been avoided had the stress not occurred. But some couples pass their stress tests. For couples with the abilities and resources to cope effectively, like my optometrist and his wife, stress provides an opportunity to exercise those abilities and draw upon those resources. Doing so may well have lasting positive benefits for couples in terms of increased self-efficacy, trust, and confidence that the relationship can weather new challenges in the future.

Support for this perspective has several implications for practitioners and policymakers hoping to increase the resilience of couples and families. First, families will benefit from policies that make their lives easier. Higher wages, more job security, and access to health care-to the extent that these policies would reduce the stress of modern life-would also promote the stability and quality of relationships, even without targeting relationships directly. Second, even in the absence of serious changes to their lives, couples might be encouraged to recognize the ways that stress affects their relationships and assisted in developing communication patterns and concrete resources to help them cope with stress effectively when it arises.

Contact Benjamin Karney at karney@psych.ucla.edu

Dr. Karney along with his colleague Thomas Bradbury are the co-authors of a new textbook titled Intimate Relationships.

References

• Conger, R. D., & Conger, K. J. (2008). Understanding the processes through which economic hardship influences families and children. In D. R. Crane & T. B. Heaton (Eds.), Handbook of families and poverty (pp. 6481). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• Hill, R. (1949). Families under stress. New York: Harper & Row.
• Karney, B. R., Story, L. B., & Bradbury, T. N. (2005). Marriages in context: Interactions between chronic and acute stress among newlyweds. In T. A. Revenson, K. Kayser, & G. Bodenmann (Eds.), Couples coping with stress: Emerging perspectives on dyadic coping (pp. 13-32). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.
• Neff, L. A., & Karney, B. R. (2004). How does context affect intimate relationships? Linking external stress and cognitive processes within marriage. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(2), 134-148.
• Neff, L. A., & Karney, B. R. (2009). Stress and reactivity to daily relationship experiences: How stress hinders adaptive processes in marriage. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 435-450.
• Van Steenbergen, E. F., Kluwer, E. S., & Karney, B. R. (under review). Moderators of associations between workload and marital satisfaction in newlyweds.