You fight — a lot.
What’s more, when you and your spouse butt heads, you really go after one another. Maybe you’re harshly critical or openly hostile toward your partner. You’re not in a physically abusive relationship. But all the turmoil feels — intuitively — unhealthy. And the fact of the matter is, in reality, it very well may be.
While research often finds that people who are married tend to be healthier than those who are divorced or never marry, a distressed marriage, marked by conflict, hostility and poor listening skills, can have the opposite effect, and is associated with a higher risk for everything from depression to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
The problem isn’t that couples disagree — which is natural with any long-term relationship. “It’s really important to discuss disagreements,” says Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, who has been studying marriage and health for 25 years. It’s the way that people disagree that really determines if and how much of a negative impact it may have on a person’s health. “Whether they’re putting down the partner, being sarcastic, demeaning, insulting — those are the kinds of behaviors that are really high on the hostile behavior list. Everybody does a few things, but the couples who are really going for the throat of the other person are the ones where we see the big differences,” Kiecolt-Glaser says.
In her latest research, Kiecolt-Glaser and her team at OSU evaluated 43 healthy married couples to see how marital distress may impact health via what happens in a person’s gut. “We found higher levels of something called lipopolysaccharide-binding protein, or LBP, which is a marker of a ‘leaky gut,’ in couples who were more hostile or nasty to each other,” she says of the study’s results, published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology in August. That is to say that marital distress may be linked to what’s also called intestinal permeability, where the thin mucosal lining of the intestine is unhealthy and “leaks,” allowing things like endotoxins (or toxins that can be found in bacterial cells) to more easily enter the bloodstream. Though research is ongoing to better understand the phenomenon, a leaky gut is associated with increased inflammation in the body. As the researchers note, previous studies by Kiecolt-Glaser and others have found, “Marital discord’s notable consequences include an amplified risk for inflammation-related diseases and disorders including depression, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and slower wound healing.”
[See: Got Diabetes? 7 Ways to Improve Your Sex Life.]
So, maybe you should really trust your gut if you feel like your fighting is out of hand and wrecking not only your relationship but your health. Short of measuring biomarkers like LBP in a lab, it’s worth considering another indicator, which has been well-studied, but that you don’t need a research background to recognize: stress.
“When we’re under a lot of stress, we have high levels of cortisol that are released, and that affects how we’re feeling — it affects our health significantly,” says Jennifer Thomas, director of clinical-behavioral health services and the chief psychologist at Sutter Center for Psychiatry in Sacramento, California. “So we really need to be able to keep those levels down.” Having a responsive spouse can help, she says. Conversely, in a distressed marriage, where couples are frequently bickering, that can drive stress levels up.
“As people get more and more stressed out, they often aren’t connecting with one another,” Thomas says. Experts say couples who take time out to connect even with work demands and taking care of kids, for example, are better able to deal with stress together, handle disagreements and defuse conflict.
On the other hand, when arguments drag on and pile up it may have a cumulative effect on health. One recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno and the University of Michigan followed 373 couples over their first 16 years of marriage to assess wives’ and husbands’ subjective health changes, or what they reported about their health, during that time, and if their conflict has negative health implications.
[See: 7 Ways to Build Resilience for Crises and Everyday Life Challenges.]
Spouses were asked to answer a few questions about their health, “including whether their health interfered with their work, if they were healthy enough to do the things they wanted to do, if they were having trouble sleeping, if they were bothered by nervousness and feeling fidgety, and whether they were being troubled by headaches,” explains Rosie Shrout, a Ph.D. student in interdisciplinary social psychology and an instructor in human development and family studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. She presented preliminary findings from the study, which hasn’t yet been published, at the International Association for Relationship Research in Fort Collins, Colorado, in July.
Overall, husbands reported better health than wives at the beginning of marriage, but husbands’ health declined over the first 16 years of marriage, while wives’ health didn’t change over time. “Then, we looked at whether disagreeing about multiple topics — such as children, money, in-laws and leisure activities — had negative health implications. For wives, the number of disagreement topics was unrelated to their health,” she says. “For husbands, the decline in health was driven by their conflict. Husbands who disagreed about several topics reported poorer health compared to those who disagreed about fewer topics, particularly coming into marriage.”
Previous research, she notes, shows that negative marital interactions are typically harder for women’s health than men’s. “So we were very surprised when we saw the opposite,” she says. Although, the reason for the difference wasn’t explored in the research, Shrout thinks, for one, that changing social norms, so that men can be more open in talking about their feelings and their emotions would help. In general, she says it’s important for couples to learn how to navigate their stress and conflict, to talk about things, and to be open and honest and not bottle up issues related to conflict.
For women and men, validation, listening well, not assuming the worst in a spouse (or their motives), certainly avoiding any form of psychological abuse (including openly displaying disgust or contempt for a partner) and staying engaged in a civil way — not being aggressive or simply withdrawing from interacting at all — are all important, according to relationship experts. Being active together is also a great way to relieve stress and increase connection (or do non-exercise activities together and work out solo), just as it’s important to do your best to keep up other healthy habits, like eating right (a tall order), when things aren’t going well, so as not to compound health problems — something that often happens when couples fight and are under stress.
And don’t wait to seek help, such as marriage counseling or therapy for issues like depression that can impact one’s relationship and health.
[See: What Only Your Partner Knows About Your Health.]
The point isn’t to not disagree or to avoid disagreeing because you’re afraid it’s going to hurt your relationship or your health; “instead, it’s learning how to deal with those disagreements in a healthy way,” Shrout says. “Because conflict is inevitable, and what’s important is learning how to deal with that conflict and work together.”
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Is Conflict With Your Spouse Undermining Your Health? originally appeared on usnews.com
