A quarrel with a colleague, a traffic jam or an unexpected car repair bill can quietly take a toll on a romantic relationship. A study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships showed that on days when people experience more stress outside the couple than usual, their love, passion and closeness to their partner temporarily decline.
Researchers distinguish between stress arising within the couple and so-called extradyadic stress - pressure and troubles that come from outside: work overload, family disagreements, unexpected expenses. It would seem, what does this have to do with feelings? However, emotional tension can seep into home life.
The study involved 100 romantic couples from a large city in the UK. Participants' ages ranged from 18 to 64, with an average of about 24. Couples had been together from three months to more than 35 years. Among them were 87 different-sex and 13 same-sex or gender-diverse couples, and about 70% were students.
For 14 days, every evening both partners independently filled out short online questionnaires. They noted whether ten typical hassles had occurred during the day (household chores, transport problems, illness, conflicts with friends or colleagues), rated their mood and, on a seven-point scale, the strength of love, passion and closeness to their partner. The word "closeness" here means a subjective sense of emotional safety and trust.
The results showed that when a person's level of external stress exceeded their personal norm, in the evening they reported weaker romantic feelings. This association held even after adjusting for mood, relationship duration and the sense of closeness on the previous day. Each additional hassle above the usual level lowered ratings by about 0.04-0.13 points on the seven-point scale. The researchers note that the effect is small, but with regular repetition it may accumulate.
At the same time, people who generally lived with more stress over the two weeks did not on average differ in having less love or passion. The authors suggest that chronically stressed people may develop ways of coping with tension, although coping mechanisms were not measured in the study. Lead author Ece Yilmaz of the University of Ottawa explained: "It is surprising that people with higher stress levels did not show a decline in love. This suggests that the negative effect is linked to exceeding the usual level of stress, rather than to the general background."
In addition, a partner's stress did not directly predict the other person's feelings. However, in additional analyses an indirect chain was traced: external stress worsened mood, and bad mood, in turn, weakened passion and closeness.
It is important to understand: this is a correlational study, that is, it records a statistical association but does not prove a cause-and-effect relationship. It cannot be ruled out that fatigue or other hidden factors influenced both the perception of stress and the assessment of the relationship. In addition, the sample was predominantly young (average relationship duration - 2.8 years), 85.5% of participants were unmarried, only 38% lived together, 85.5% were white, and 80% were heterosexual. The average level of love was high - about 6.6 points - so the results may not extend to couples in a prolonged crisis. Finally, stress was measured using a checklist of events, without assessing their subjective severity.
Nevertheless, the authors emphasize the practical meaning: if you feel a cooling toward your partner, perhaps the issue is not the relationship but accumulated external stress. This understanding may help get through difficult times without unnecessary reproaches.