Coping with stress as a couple

Researchers call it dyadic coping: you talk about stress, help each other deal with it, and tackle some stressors together as a team¹. It comes in a few forms. In common coping, you're both affected by the stress and work on it as a unit. In supportive coping, one of you is mainly affected and the other lends a hand. Delegated and negative forms are described too².

The positive forms are worth having. Couples who report them tend to report higher relationship satisfaction, more constructive communication and more stability over time³. That holds for both partners, whether or not one of you has a chronic illness⁴. Positive coping also tends to predict satisfaction better than the negative kind does¹.

Here's the twist: how your partner sees your coping, and how the two of you see it together, predicts satisfaction more strongly than how you see your own¹. In other words, help counts most when it lands. Among couples facing chronic illness, both partners coped better when they talked about stress and when the support given matched what the partner needed².

A few things to try:

• Say when you're stressed, and say what kind of help you'd like: a listen, a hand with the dishes, or twenty minutes alone.
• Ask rather than guess what would help. Nobody is a mind-reader, however long you've been together.
• Be open about your worries instead of keeping them to yourself.

Keep talking, keep supporting each other, and go easy when you're both running on fumes. Stress can make it harder to talk, listen and feel connected⁵, so some distance is normal. It doesn't mean the relationship is failing: stress changes how people think, feel and respond to each other⁵.

It helps to know why. In newlywed couples, people under more stress reacted more strongly to everyday relationship ups and downs⁶. Coping with outside stress also uses up mental energy, which may leave less for responding well to each other⁷. So a snappy reply at 7pm may say more about the day than about your partner.

What to do about it:

• Talk openly about what's stressing each of you, then work out together how to handle it.
• Ask what kind of support would help, instead of assuming.
• Don't hide your worries to shield your partner. In Western couples dealing with a medical condition, this "protective buffering" had negative effects on wellbeing for both the person doing it and the person on the receiving end, whichever partner did it, despite good intentions³.
• Give each other some slack on the tired, grumpy days. The second helping of patience is for both of you.

Name it, then face it together. Pressure from outside can come from work, money, family, health or big events such as buying a house, having a baby or planning a wedding⁸. It can spill into a relationship: in partnered adults during COVID-19, greater financial strain was linked with poorer relationship satisfaction over time⁹.

Coping together looks protective. A systematic review found that dyadic coping reduced the spillover of long-running outside stress into stress inside the relationship, particularly for women on average³. Emotion-focused coping together may also guard against immediate relationship strain from financial stress¹⁰. It isn't a guaranteed shield, though: the buffering showed up during the initial confinement period but not 20 months later⁹, and it doesn't always show up day to day¹¹.

Some ways to put it into practice:

• Face pressures as a team. Money worries, busy schedules and housework are easier when you talk them through together, and you're likely to feel more supported¹².
• Check what help each of you wants. Some couples coped well together on their own, others did better with outside support, and some valued independence².
• Stay on an equal footing. In couples coping with Parkinson's disease, coping together was helped by treating each other as equals, sharing humour and taking the other's perspective².
• Expect to be a bit less patient when outside stress has drained you, and go easier on both of you.