For many people, the COVID pandemic, with its ensuing lockdowns and social distancing, has taken its toll on the physical and psychological health. This is especially true for those who live alone. It even effect couples who haven’t gotten sick from the virus.
By nature we are highly social. Social isolation has a profound negative impact on our well-being. Researchers had assumed that intimate couples living together would manage the lockdowns and social distancing better than those without a significant other. After all, they have each other to provide social and emotional support.
However, UCLA psychologist Benjamin Haggerty and his colleagues challenge this received wisdom in an article they recently published in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology.
Intimate Couples Need More Than Just Each Other
According to Haggerty, intimate couples need other people too. They need this just as everyone else. Weekend getaway can be a romantic. The experience can strengthens the bonds of an intimate couple. However, weeks and months of seclusion together can create significant stresses on a relationship. This is especially true when the couple is facing financial problems, work-related worries, or childcare.
Larger social networks provide individuals with both material and emotional support. Friends, coworkers, and family members provide companionship, and help us out in times of need. Our relationships with others help validate our sense of self-worth. We learn from them. We learn that there really are people out there who want to be a part of tour lives. Moreover, intimate couples also need help from close friends and family. Friends help.
Even before the pandemic, research proved that couples who are socially isolated fare worse than those who are well integrated into their larger social networks. Partners that have sufficient social connections can turn to these friends in times of stress. But isolated couples end up venting their frustrations against each other. Furthermore, socially isolated couples are more likely to break up than those who are socially connected.
Shared Social Networks: Friends and In-Laws – Shared social networks are especially important. Husbands and wives with few friends in common often experience decreased relationship satisfaction. They’re more likely to divorce as well. They’re also more likely to experience infidelity. In other words, its very important for the couple as a unit to be accepted within a particular social network.
Support and approval from a network of friends and family members is especially important in the early years of a relationship. The two partners are learning their identity as a couple.
Likewise, the first years also tend to be the most financially precarious, especially for young couples. Material and moral support from a social network are especially important. Without these, the new relationship is likely to break from the stress.
Older couples, especially when they’re financially secure, may be in a better position to make it through extended periods of isolation unscathed. However, many older couples drift apart over the years.
While they remain committed to the relationship, they get most of their social validation from friends and family rather than their partners. In such a case, spending a lockdown period together can be a painful experience.
Social isolation is also difficult for couples with children. Even in happy families, members can get on each others nerves after endless days stuck in the house together. In dysfunctional families, the overwhelming stresses of social isolation can even lead to violence.
The Role of Culture – Haggerty and colleagues point out that culture also plays a role in how well couples can tolerate pandemic lockdowns and social distancing. For example, East Asian cultures tend to be highly collectivistic. Social networks, especially extended family structures, are far stronger. Furthermore, individuals try to choose mates that their families approve of, rather than marrying whoever they want to.
Because these relationships already come with built-in social networks, married couples in these cultures already have the support they need to make it through periods of social isolation.
This aspect of collectivistic cultures revealed its strength as the pandemic unfolded in early 2020. In East Asian countries, people may abided by government regulations mandating masks and lockdowns, with the result that the spread of the virus was curtailed far better than it was in Western countries with their individualistic cultures.
Four hundred years ago, the English poet John Donne wrote these memorable words: No man is an island, entire of itself. Even in individualistic Western society, we just cant go it alone. We need strong social networks, not just to survive, but also to thrive. This is also true of intimate couples. In recent decades, the idea of spouse as soulmate has taken hold in our culture. It may be romantic to tell your lover that they’re the only one you’ll ever need. But in reality, intimate relationships can only thrive when they’re embedded within supportive social networks of family and friends. read more
