It’s natural to sometimes stress over the state of your relationship, but overdoing it could be destroying your chances of staying together.
A recent study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships has analysed how an individual’s feelings of insecurity can affect the success of a coupling.
Researchers interviewed 157 couples about how they communicated their attachment to each other, how comfortable they were with emotionally connecting, their relationship satisfaction and occurrences of conflict in their union.
And their findings are kind of common sense.
When individuals reported high levels of anxiety about their partner’s commitment – both experienced volatility in their feelings about relationship satisfaction.
When the woman solely experienced this anxiety, their male partners reported fluctuating feelings about the success of the relationship. But when the situation is reversed and it’s the male who reported anxiety in the relationship, women were able to maintain the security of the partnership.
“Women may be more skilled in buffering the deleterious impact of attachment anxiety on relationship quality reports by developing behaviours that compensate for the behaviours of their anxious partner,” the researchers write.
“This pattern could be because attachment anxiety in their partners may activate women’s desires to care for their partners, especially because women may be expected to take on the role of maintaining the relationship.”
Source: Read Full Article