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Whether it’s a deadline for work, a traffic jam, a leaking roof, or a broken down car, everyday stressors can undermine relationships. Routine troubles tend to weigh people down, consume energy, and make them more likely to lash out on a partner, even when the partner is clearly not to blame for the problem in question.
But the COVID-19 pandemic is nothing like a demanding boss or a late train. It turned the world upside down, hammered national economies and made headlines for over a year, making it a pretty visible target for negative sentiment. Now, a study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science shows that when couples blamed their daily stressors on the pandemic, each person ended up being happier with their partner despite the unprecedented burdens of the disaster.
“Stress pulls us in and wears us out,” says senior author and relationship researcher Lisa Neff of the University of Texas at Austin. This exhaustion can indirectly harm a romantic relationship, a phenomenon called stress overflow. But the effects of blaming stress on bigger issues, such as a natural disaster or a serious medical diagnosis, have long been unclear, says Neff. Some studies have shown that stress spills over, while others have found that couples actually report greater satisfaction with their partners.
Couples are much more aware of major stressors when they occur, says Neff. Such events are usually all-consuming and easy to point out as reasons to feel irritable or unhappy. “Under these conditions, people could use the stressor as a scapegoat,” she says. Even though the pandemic is such a once-in-a-century event, says Neff, there are past analogues, such as the 2007-2009 financial crisis. “During this period, people tended to blame the poor economy for the problems in their relationship,” she explains. A 2011 study found that these people reported feeling happier with their partner than couples who blamed each other for their daily money problems.
To test whether a similar phenomenon occurred during the COVID era, Neff and his colleagues interviewed 191 participants for 14 days in April and May 2020. Members of the group, which included 81 couples and 29 people who had a partner but no one was participating, answered questions about the sources of her stress and how satisfied she was with her relationship. The researchers then repeated the two-week survey last November and December and analyzed the responses. The team found that people generally blamed the pandemic for their daily stress more than they blamed themselves or their partner. When participants reported that the stress was caused by the pandemic, they also said they were more satisfied with their relationship.
Neff says she was surprised to observe that the benefits of the pandemic scapegoat have lasted for months. “We thought that as the situation evolved people might forget [the pandemic], or the stress would become too much, ”she said. “But even in our follow-up wave, it was still beneficial.” Neff postulates that because their follow-up took place in November and December 2020, COVID-19 was always a top concern for attendees as they reflected on how to travel and celebrate the holidays.
“This is a really new app for understanding relationships in the days of COVID,” says Ashley Randall, a researcher at Arizona State University who studies how couples cope with stress and has not been involved in the new study. But she adds that this work does not present a complete picture. “There are significant limitations when it comes to the demographics of the study,” she says. For example, participants were mostly white and well-educated, and only 16 percent reported reduced work hours and pay. People who lost their jobs or couldn’t pay their bills might have experienced pandemic stress differently than those who remained financially secure. Concomitant events, such as high-profile incidents of police brutality and an increase in anti-Asian rhetoric and violence, may also have affected stressors for non-white couples, Randall notes.
In addition, the analysis did not include same-sex couples. Neff says her calculations suggest women might experience more benefits than men, but she cautions that because more women than men participated in her survey, these results might not be significant. In previous studies of how the pandemic affected relationships, women reported greater emotional distress and found it more difficult to maintain a healthy work-life balance than men. While Neff does not plan to delve into the gender issue further due to the limitations of her sample, she is now investigating whether confinement and wasting time alone during COVID lockdowns actually brought the couples closer rather than separated them.
But even if the scapegoat pandemic helped couples feel happier with their partner at the end of each day, is it healthy for people to blame all their relationship problems on outside forces? “It is easier for us to look outside of ourselves, as this ability to take and recognize ownership [is harder]”Whether COVID-19 is the stressor or not, says Randall.
Either way, Neff and Randall claim that this research shows how couples who present a “united front” against a common stressor can go through difficult times by reframing issues as obstacles to be overcome together. Learning to identify and verbally communicate these stressors helps relationships stay resilient, says Randall. “These strategies are important …[in the] pandemic and beyond, ”she adds.
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