Celebrate what’s right with your partner

A while ago, I read an article by Shelly Gable titled “Will you be there for me when things go right?” It’s a very interesting idea.

When we are in a close relationship with someone else, we expect them to be there for us when things go wrong. Our dog dies – we want our partner to comfort us. Our fridge breaks – we want our partner to console us and help us move the new one. The new car breaks down and the dealership won’t honour the warranty – we want our partner to get angry with us and march supportively with us all the way to the dealership, demanding retribution.

In other words, when things don’t go well, we want our partner there with us, supporting us, emotionally matching our state and aligning with our interests and needs.

But what about when things go well?

You pass a difficult exam – you want your partner to celebrate with you. You share a happy memory – you want your partner to revel in the savouring with you. You get a promotion – you want your partner to congratulate you and tell you how wonderful you are. Right?

When good things happen, people want to share that event with others and this process is called “capitalization”. The people we choose to capitalize with are usually close to us – like spouses, parents, siblings, roommates, partners, best friends. But sometimes those people we share with don’t respond in the way we wanted. What is the impact of this mismatch on the relationship? Gable and her co-researchers wanted to find out.

They worked with 79 dating couples and watched them share positive and negative events with each other, and measured how the listener responded – was it an emotional match? was the intensity matched? And the teller of the event was also asked if he/she felt validated.

Now there are many permutations of how this study was constructed to be as fair as possible – all couples were heterosexual (those are the ones who responded to the research request) and so sometimes the men went first with their story and sometimes the women went first. Sometimes it was a positive event shared first, and sometimes it was a negative event shared first. All couples were in exclusive relationships, and were considered stable over time. However, I’m not going to get into all those details, because the really interesting part is the conclusion, not the study design.

Eight weeks after the study, both members of each couple were independently sent follow-up questionnaires. By that time, four couples had broken up. Interestingly, men in the couples that broke up before the follow-up felt less understood, validated and cared for following their positive event discussion, but not following the negative event discussion. And outside raters agreed: the women in those couples that had broken up responded less actively and less constructively during the male partner’s positive event sharing.

And for women? Both positive and negative event responsiveness – that is, how their male partner responded to both negative and positive event disclosures – were important in the moment, but only positive event responsiveness predicted future relationship health.

Gable admits that these are preliminary results, given the small number of couples that broke up in the few weeks after the study, but it’s still fascinating. Supporting your partner in times of stress isn’t the same thing as supporting your partner in times of celebration. And if you want that relationship to work well and to last a long time, you had better pay attention to the good news stories that your partner shares, because if you aren’t there for your partner when things go well, your partner may not stick around.

 

Reference:

Gable, S. L., Gonzaga, G., & Strachman, A. (2006). Will you be there for me when things go right? Social Support for Positive Events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 904-917.