It almost goes without saying that having a romantic partner with whom you can share anything is ideal for your relationship’s success. According to the standard for openness, partners who are truly close are able to reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings to each other. You may not share every single trivial detail of your life to your partner, but you certainly want to feel you could. More importantly, you expect your partner to feel precisely the same way. Keeping things from each other just doesn’t seem to fit the romantic ideal of true intimacy.
Even in the best relationship, however, people hide things from each other. You may not feel particularly comfortable telling your partner that you get a little bit turned on when your next-door neighbor goes out for a morning run wearing only the skimpiest of athletic gear. Perhaps you think it’s better to leave out the part where you bump into that neighbor on the street and engage in a little light-hearted banter.
Once you start pursuing this line of thought, you may start to wonder, further, whether your partner fesses up to every mental (or otherwise) flirtation. Are you getting the full story of what goes on in your partner’s life? You thought you had an understanding that once you expressed your love for each other, no one would hold anything back. Maybe that isn’t what’s happening after all.
Failure to disclose doesn’t just have to involve feelings toward possible cheating. Imagine you seen an envelope addressed to your partner from your auto insurance company which strikes you as somewhat puzzling. As far as you know, you’re up to date in your payments. As it turns out, your partner was in a minor accident and was found to be at fault but didn't tell you. How come you only hear about this second hand? Why didn’t your partner tell you about it? Why hide this from you?
The standard for openness which is part of our society’s prescription for intimacy is one that probably preoccupies people the most early in a relationship, when the ground rules are being set. Later on, you realize that it’s not all that important, or that relevant, to retell every mundane detail of your everyday life when you and your partner sit down for the evening meal. However, because that standard for openness is so fundamental to the definition of a close relationship, you feel that you could bring those details up and not be judged. You would certainly be able to expect, according to this standard, that you could talk about whatever problems you’re having or stress you’re experiencing.
As reported by Ohio University’s Charee Thompson, writing with Anita Vangelisti of the University of Texas (2016), there is a strong positive association between relationship quality and the extent to which partners feel their standards for openness are being met. In describing what those standards for openness are, they note that “People who endorse a standard for openness believe that partners should be willing to and comfortable with disclosing their needs, wants, feelings, emotions, and things that are bothering them” (p. 321). Conversely, when couples engage in topic avoidance, they “feel they cannot speak to partners about their thoughts and feelings, or that partners are hiding information from them” (p. 321).
Having a partner who falls short on this key element of relationship satisfaction, perhaps ironically, can create stress. You’re stressed now because you don’t feel that your partner believes as much as you do in the power of confiding to one another. Yet, because you feel you don’t have a completely open relationship, you’re not comfortable sharing this stress with your partner. You’re left with the unpleasant prospect of ruminating over what’s going on unless you can figure out a way to alleviate your stress in some productive manner.
A good deal of research on stress and coping tells us that stress is in the eye of the beholder. There may be nothing objectively wrong with your relationship. Because you believe it to be falling short of the standard you’ve set for it, however, you allow it to become a source of irritation and worry. Then, again following from the coping literature, the way you manage the stress will depend on whether you think it’s something you can fix. If it’s not fixable, you will survive it best by trying to feel better about it or deriving some kind of meaning from its existence. If it’s fixable, though, you will do better if you can get to the root of the problem and eliminate it.
Thompson and Vangelisti, proceeding from a stress and coping perspective, decided to investigate the way that partners in a relationship cope with the perception that their relationship is falling short on the openness criterion. They used a primarily female undergraduate sample because, as they note, they were specifically interested in finding people who would be relatively unrealistic in their hopes for openness due to their inexperience. These youngish partners might also, the authors reasoned, be less sure about how much self-disclosure among partners is the right amount. This uncertainty could cause them to be more stressed, leading them to be more dependent on coping as a way to feel better about their dating partners.
We usually think of coping as a way to reduce stress, but the Thompson and Vangelisti team were interested in the coping strategies that created the most problems for the relationship. Three emerged as particular culprits—punishing the partner, walking out, and reframing the partner’s behavior in negative ways. You can see how punishing and walking out would be detrimental, but what about reframing? We usually think of reframing as a beneficial way to cope with stress. However, for these young women, the harm was caused by their seeing their partner’s behavior as unchangeable. In helpful reframing, you see the problem as not that bad. In harmful reframing, in contrast, you see your partner as someone who will never meet your own standards. At that point, you will be less likely to try to work through a possible solution or to recalibrate your own openness standards.
Out of all the coping strategies that worked, one emerged which we rarely find studied in relationship research: humor. If they could avoid sarcasm and be honest even while joking about their differences with their partner, these young women seemed better able to manage the stress of not having their standards met. Making light of the situation while still making your point might be the best way to get your partner on board with becoming more open.
To sum up, close communication is a vital feature of a satisfactory intimate relationship. When your standards aren’t met, rather than walk out, seek retribution, or become derisive, work with your partner to see how both of you can get on the same side of the openness standard. Just by realizing that you have these standards may be enough to get that coping ball rolling in your favor.
Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging. Feel free to join my Facebook group, "Fulfillment at Any Age," to discuss today's blog, or to ask further questions about this posting.
Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2016
References
Thompson, C. M., & Vangelisti, A. L. (2016). What happens when the standard for openness goes unmet in romantic relationships? Analyses of stress, coping, and relational consequences. Journal of Social And Personal Relationships, 33(3), 320-343. doi:10.1177/0265407515574468
from Psychology Today - Relationships http://ift.tt/291aLvD
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment