Yahoo Finance Stress Can Ruin Your Relationship, but Blaming the Pandemic Could Save It, Research Shows
If your relationship is rocky after months of lockdown-related angst, there’s a simple fix: blame COVID-19. People who attribute their troubles to the pandemic rather than their significant other are happier in their relationship, fresh research from The University of Texas at Austin has revealed.
Analysing data gathered from 191 people during the early weeks of the pandemic and again seven months later, the researchers sought to determine whether blaming COVID-19 could reduce how much stress affected their romantic relationships – known as stress spillover.
The participants completed a questionnaire assessing the degree to which they blamed the pandemic for their problems, plus a 14-day daily survey that focused on their life stressors, general relationship satisfaction and any negative behaviour they expressed toward their significant other. (continued below)
Romantic partners tend to be especially critical toward each other during times of common stress, prior research has shown, The study results, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, concluded that blaming COVID-19 reduced the toxic effects of stress on a relationship.
“People generally were more blaming of the pandemic for their current problems than they were blaming of their romantic partner,” says Lisa Neff, an associate professor of human development and family sciences at The University of Texas at Austin and one of the study’s co-authors. “Individuals who were more blaming of the pandemic were more resilient to the harmful effects of stress.”
Neff and the team expected this “buffering effect” to wane as the pandemic dragged on, taxing participants’ coping resources over the long-term. But it didn’t. Blaming the pandemic doesn’t totally negate the effects of stress, obviously – it won’t stop you bickering about taking the bins out – but generally speaking, the more self-aware people were about the true source of their malaise, the better they were able to deal with it.
“When couples are aware that stress may be impacting their relationship, it’s easier for couples for shift blame for their problems away from each other and onto the stressor,” Neff says. “Doing so can help partners support each other more effectively, and ultimately, be more successful in weathering those difficult times.”
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