R E L AT I O N S H I P
Marital bliss in trouble?
Stop expecting so much
from your spouse
H
aving high expectations from your spouse can
lead to unnecessary conflict and even divorce,
finds a newly-published study. For marriages involving higher levels of indirect hostility or other severe
problems, keeping high expectations further erodes the
relationship, researchers warn, adding that high standards whether in caring, support or independence improve satisfaction only in strongly-bonded marital ties.
“Some people demand too much from their marriages
because they feel that their marriages must fulfill the
needs that they are not capable of achieving either because they have limited time, energy, effort, or skills to
apply to their marriages,” explained lead researcher
James McNulty from Florida State University. “But there
are other people who demand too little from their marriages. Their marriage is a potential source of personal
fulfillment that they are not exploiting,” McNulty added
in the paper published in the journal of Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin. To reach this conclusion,
the team collected data from 135 newly-wed couples.
The couples continued to report their marital satisfaction
via a questionnaire every six months for four years. As
newly-weds, husbands and wives reported being rela-
tively satisfied with their marriages and relatively high
standards. Yet their reports also indicated that some
couples were less happy and demanded less than others. The extent to which spouses’ standards were associated with changes in satisfaction over time depended
on the couples’ tendencies to engage in indirect hostility.
Couples that worked well together, as indicated by low
levels of indirect hostility, were better able to meet higher standards and thus showed Y