Calling all individuals in a committed relationship! A new study can give you better tips than Cosmo on how to have a longer and overall happier relationship. While The Beatles claimed, “All you need is love,” you actually need understanding and empathy too.
A new study has revealed that women experience more happiness when they have empathetic and understanding partners who can sympathize with their experiences. While men are more apt to tune into moments when their mates are happy or content, what women want is men who tune into their sadness, frustration, and other upset feelings. Being able to do so can lead to a longer, more satisfying relationship.
Shiri Cohen, PhD, and Robert J. Waldinger, PhD, both of Harvard Medical School, in conjunction with Marc S. Schulz, PhD, and Emily Weiss of Bryn Mawr College published an article in the Journal of Family Psychology titled “Eye of the Beholder: The Individual and Dyadic Contributions of Empathic Accuracy and Perceived Empathic Effort to Relationship Satisfaction.”
The group conducted a study using a diverse sampling of couples. The study revealed that the more women were able to perceive empathy and understanding from their mate, the more satisfaction they expressed with the relationship in general. Dr. Shiri Cohen led the study; she speculates that women feel more secure in a relationship in which they feel the man is more invested, and emotional involvement is a strong indication of the emotional investment women seek.
There were 156 heterosexual couples who participated in the study, mostly from the Boston area. The couples were not required to be married but in a committed relationship. The researchers included couples with a history of domestic violence as well as those who had experienced abuse as children in order to bring diversity to the group in the way conflicts were handled. More than 100 of the couples were young, and almost three-quarters were white. About half of the couples were married.
The couples were asked to relate an experience using audio recordings of the statements in which there had been an incident with the partner that was upsetting or frustrating. The couples then listened to the statements and were videotaped during a ten-minute process of trying to come to a better resolution. Finally, while the couple watched the videotape of themselves working through the issue, they rated their positive and negative emotional reactions on an 11-point scale. The researchers pulled segments of each couples’ video in which the most negative and most positive ratings had occurred and had the couples answer additional questions about the specific situation as well as about their overall happiness with the relationship.
The study revealed a strong relationship between the ability of the man to recognize his partner’s positive feelings and the overall happiness with the relationship, which was expected. The surprising result of the study was the revelation that women were much more likely to rate their relationship as highly satisfactory if they recognized that their partner was upset in the video. The implication of these results revealed the importance to women of the emotional investment the male must make for the relationship to be considered satisfactory by the female.