Telling a partner about your bad day can bring you closer

Sharing your bad experiences with a partner might not make you feel better — but it could strengthen your relationship.


By Matthew Warren


When something bad happens to you in your everyday life — you get a parking ticket, say, or have a disagreement with a co-worker — your first instinct may be to tell a loved one about it. But what purpose does this serve? Although we often believe that venting to a partner will help us feel better, past research suggests that it can actually prolong negative emotions, or even have a spillover effect, leaving the listener feeling worse too. But a new paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science has another explanation for why we tell loved ones about these everyday hassles: it brings couples closer together.

Antje Rauers and Michaela Riediger from the University of Jena recruited 100 heterosexual couples living in Berlin; half were aged 20-30 and half aged 69-80. Both partners first independently rated their relationship closeness, and then took part in a diary study over the course of three weeks. They each received notifications to complete a survey on their phone, six times per day for 15 days. In each survey, they noted whether they had recently experienced something “very unpleasant” (this could be an actual incident, like oversleeping, or a thought, like thinking about a recent fight), and indicated whether they had told their partner about it. They also rated the extent to which they felt angry, downcast, disappointed, and nervous, and indicated how close they felt to their partner at that point in time. Finally, 2.5 years later, most of the couples again rated their relationship closeness.

On average, participants completed the surveys 87 times in the three-week period, and reported that they’d had an unpleasant experience in 10 of them. They said that they’d discussed these experiences with their partner 57% of the time.

The team found that when men had experienced an unpleasant event, they reported less negative mood if they told their partner about it than if they didn’t. Women didn’t show the same benefit, but did report more negative mood if a partner had told them about his bad experience. The results suggest that telling a partner about daily hassles can have both emotional benefits and drawbacks — though the authors also point out that these effects were very small.

More strikingly, participants reported feeling closer to their partner after either telling them about an unpleasant event or after hearing about an unpleasant event that their partner had experienced. And sharing these hassles with a partner seemed to have long-term effects too: people whose partners regularly told them about their negative experiences reported an increase in closeness over the 2.5 year period, while those whose partners rarely or never shared these experiences reported a decrease in closeness.

Overall, the results show that sharing bad experiences with a partner has minimal and conflicting effects on our mood. However, it seems to bring couples closer, both in the short- and long-term.

The team suggests that when you hear about a partner’s bad day-to-day experiences, it creates an image of that partner as a nuanced person who trusts you. Over time, this could lead to greater closeness. Interestingly, participants didn’t report a similar long-term increase in closeness when they were the ones regularly telling their partners about their own negative experiences. This could be because there are other factors that shape the effects of sharing bad news with a partner, the researchers write. For instance, if a partner doesn’t listen to you, then attempting to share your bad experiences with them could actually drive you apart rather than bring you closer. There are various limitations to the study. The correlational design means that it’s not really possible to conclude that sharing bad experiences actually causes couples to become closer: it could be that there is some other aspect of the relationship that both helps couples to open up with each other and fosters closeness. The couples also all reported being close even before the study started, so it would be interesting to see whether talking about daily hassles has similar effects for partners who don’t feel close, or for other pairs of people not in romantic relationships, such as friends or acquaintances.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/telling-partner-about-your-bad-day-can-bring-you-closer(accessed 14.8.22)