Marriages and relationships disclose within wider environmental frameworks that at times analyze how the relationship is durable. When marital and relationship framework comprises of plentiful stressful life happenings inclusive of work stress or financial difficulties, marriages often encounter an occurrence referred to as stress spillover.
Therefore, this paper had the aim of discussing the effects of stress on a marriage and relationships and how the stress can be reduced and controlled. Various literature reviews were used to ensure its accomplishment.
According to research, marriages and relationships are disclosed within broad environmental frameworks that at times analyze if the relationship is durable (Saxbe & Rena, 2010). When a marital and relationship framework comprises of plenty of life challenges, including work stress or financial difficulties, marriages often encounter an occurrence referred to as stress spillover.
For instance, between comparisons of the matter, the couples facing, high versus low levels of external stress demonstrate that those encountering more severe stress experience greater reductions in their marital and relationship satisfaction over the early years of marriage.
In most cases, stress can make both the partners to become intolerant and impatient, making it difficult for them to offer each other support and also help in solving their problems together. Various studies define stress as the way a persons body reacts to any kind of demand. It may occur due to both the positive and negative experiences.
Stress affects every person, especially nowadays when it can seriously cause havoc on marriage and relationships because of various reasons. A considerable number of people may have good intentions of not causing problems at work or in any other aspect of life. However, unfortunately, they have a difficult time keeping stress-driven emotions from spilling over into their relationships with their partners.
According to the research, peoples bodies react to stress through the release of hormones into the blood. They provide people with more energy and power that could be a good thing if their stress were a result of physical harm (Powers & Paula, 2006). However, it can be the worst thing if their stress is a reaction to some emotional factor where there is no outlet for an extra vigor and potency.
Stress in relationships and marriages may occur due to various reasons, including fatigue and overworking. Thus, internal stress that occurs as a result of too much worrying over things that cannot be changed help solve them. In addition, other people get stressed due to environmental stress, such as family and crowding, among others.
Therefore, such types of stresses within a relationship or a marriage may lead to adverse effects that may even cause a marriage or relationship breakup. Therefore, according to the message from various literature concerning the stress and marriage, stressful frameworks influence the quality of marital status.
Nevertheless, some stress and marriage studies argue that despite the fact that a considerable number of relationships disintegrate in case of some difficulties, while others may come forward from stressful encounters comparatively unharmed. For instance, they argue that adverse life incidents, like cancer, death of a child, as well facing a natural disaster, essentially foresee marital enhancements among some couples.
Accordingly, a significant number of models of stress have started to move away from emphasizing the dangerous effects of stress in order to reflect the provisions under which stress may serve to improve the well-being. This implies that some stressful situations can provide chances by activating formerly unexploited managing strategies and thus increasing self-assurance in ones ability to overcome stress.
Therefore, through this approach, handling manageable stress may lead to positive changes that can make triumphant adjustment of future stressors more likely. As a result, people who are exposed to reasonably stressful encounters, as well as those who have the primary resources essential to conquer those stresses, may develop flexibility to harmful effects of later stress.
Despite the proof for possible positive impacts of stress, to date, there has not been any empirical study observing these type of impacts of stress flexibility on relationships and marriages.
According to literature reviews on the effects of stress on marriages and relationships, stress acts as a barrier to adaptive association performance. Though the susceptibility for stressful frameworks to weaken marital satisfaction has long been developed, the study has only recently expanded on the precise approaches underlying these spillover impacts.
Further, some studies argue that circumstances of a stressful life may interfere with a couple’s efforts to take part in relationship promotive behaviors. Constants with the common conception that a healthy marriage and relationship need work, a sizeable literature demonstrates that productive relationship behaviors are not habitual in nature and thus need superior self-control in order to endorse than do negative behaviors.
Unluckily, according to presuppositions regarding self-regulation, self-control is an inadequate resource that can become exhausted through the utilization making further acts of self-management harder. This, therefore, implies that self authoritarian capabilities operate like a muscle that can become drained after hard work.
Therefore, couples may meet more hardship in engaging in positive relationship functioning at times when their energy and resources are being exploited among various effortful behaviors. Therefore, in this way, handling stressful occurrences outside the marriage may tax couple’s self dictatorial materials leaving them with little vigor to effectively and efficiently manage their marriage and relationship issues.
Some people support the idea that on the days when couples encounter heavy work conditions, their partners demonstrate more irritable and angry behavior in home environment. Studies examining partner’s interaction before and after a stress induction work show that the quality of marital communications dramatically reduces, following the stressor.
In addition, at times when partners in marriage or in a relationship are facing greater stress, their ability to participate in pardoning responses to a partner’s misbehaviors is reduced.
On the other hand, during periods of low stress, these couples tend to excuse any misbehavior and provide the partner with the benefit of the uncertainty. Therefore, these literature findings demonstrate the negative effects and the ways stresses shape and constrain couples within the relationship, thus leading them to lower marital joy and happiness.
Various studies argue that under the right condition, stress can assist in fortifying marital well-being, despite the fact that it most of the time it aims at impeding adaptive relationship processes. These studies emphasize the idea of the model of “practice makes perfect”, as experience with little prevailing stressors early in the relationship may assist couples to establish stability to bigger stressors in future.
For example, in spite of the idea that presupposition of self authorization proposes that handling stress may make self dictatorial abilities to be weak and lead to difficulties in managing productive responses to a relationship issues, this perception also proposes that self-regulatory muscle can be empowered over time.
Take for instance the daily exercises that can increase physical power, leading to small acts of self-management that creates a person’s self-regulatory possessions, thus assisting people to retain superior self-control in the process of future depleting situations.
It is argued further that practicing coping with manageable stressors is vital for creating personal coping skills.
According to the theory of stress immunization, being exposed to moderately stressful events should act as a mobile to an individual’s coping resources, just the way a vaccine renders a person to a weakened form of dangerous disease in order to enhance the creation of antibodies for fighting powerful forms of the disease (Hellmuth & McNulty, 2008).
Nonetheless, for anyone to benefit from this theory of stress immunization, people need to be rendered both to the moderate stress and must also have enough resources for productively conquering that stress.
As long as the available resources are sufficient enough to efficiently overcome the primary stress, these encounters can offer couples with superior understanding of adjective coping strategies and increased confidence in their capability of mastering stressful happenings, thus immunizing them against the dangerous influences of future stressors.
According to the literature about theories of stress immunization, people who are exposed to manageable stresses and have primary resources readily available to assist them to efficiently manage those stresses may become more pliant to future stress.
Therefore, based on this concept, it can be foreseen that couples who encounter moderate stress early in the marriage and possess superior primary resources for steering stress, like developing better behaviors in solving problems, stand a better position of being less vulnerable to future stress spillover influences than would couples that have better primary recourses but few practices coping with stressful experiences.
In most cases, it is assumed that the birth of a child in marriage leads to happiness; however, that is not the case for most couples because this is one of the most stressful moments in some marriages.
According to studies assessing the spouse’s pre and post-birth stress levels have demonstrated that partners report encountering greater rates of personal and marital stress immediately after the birth of their child (Diamond & Hicks, 2008). Therefore, these increases in stress most of the time lead to increase in reduction of marital quality.
One study focusing on the transformation to parenthood in newly married spouses demonstrated that despite the fact that all spouses reported drops in their joint leisure activities over time, these reductions were higher for those spouses who became parents.
In other words, this implies that the stress of parenthood seems to cause destruction in practices that assist with promoting intimacy in the relationship. Furthermore, the shift to parenthood accounted for decreases in overall marital satisfaction encountered by matched control couples who were voluntarily childless.
Stress can be reduced and controlled in relationships and marriages through various means. Perhaps one of the most essential means of a successful relationship includes the relative independence of general fulfillment from immediate occurrences. This is because every intimate relationship faces fluctuations in the daily interactions.
For instance, couples may face primarily positive, supportive, as well as affectionate interactions with each other; however, other days, their interactions may be characterized by conflict and negativity. Studies have suggested that sustaining fulfillment over the course of a long-term relationship centers on how intimates process interpret the variability in the particular encounters of each other (Dale, 2003).
Provided that the quality or relationship encounters varies from day to day, connecting general relationship evaluations to these particular events is most likely to lead to feelings of international fulfillment that are unstable and potentially vulnerable to reduction.
Equally, dividing general judgments of the relationship from the perspectives of immediate experiences within the relationship serves as providing protection to global fulfillment from any particularly negative experiences that may occur and which leads to relationship satisfaction that is greater and more resistant to change.
It is also suggested that in order to reduce or control stress in relationship and marriages, it is significant that couples recognize that ability alone is not able to promote the adaptive processing of relationship information. Therefore, couples with superior relationship proficiency should live better in their relationship than those without the proficiency (Neff & Karney, 2009).
Nonetheless, it is essential to realize that despite the level of the ability that couples have, they also need to have the capability to participate in adaptive processing which includes supportive background within which they can practice their capabilities.
Thus, it means that ability may be relevant but may not be useful for positive relationship performance. Partners who show positive proficiency in the relationship may get themselves unable to draw upon those proficiencies under conditions of stress, leading to a satisfactory reduction even among previously happy spouses.
According to literature, recognizing the importance of stress in functioning of the relationship provides a potential explanation to when adaptive processes may break down and gives the insight into how relationships may sometimes be created again after the unhappy periods (Neff & Broady, 2011).
In case couples face a time of extreme stress during the course of a relationship, their adaptive processes may be weakened causing more negative assessments of the relationship.
In this way, long or repeated exposure to high levels of stress may have lifelong detrimental impacts on the relationship. Nevertheless, in case the stress collapses and couples can again dedicate their full resources to participating in positive relationship sustaining strategies, then relationships have the chance to pull through.
The environmental framework in which couples form and maintain their relationship plays a vital role in determining marital outcomes most of the time. Conventionally, it has been argued that stressful frameworks expose preserving a healthy relationship to be more difficult.
However, today’s research provides some of the best experimental evidence of stress flexibility within marriage and relationship and provides suggestions that stress can promote the durability of a relationship and marriage under certain conditions (Kuppens, 2008).
Therefore, by discussing and dealing with the conditions under which the couples may be more or less susceptible to stress spread out effects, these literature reviews have offered a detailed appreciation of the connections between stress and marital quality.
Because all couples encounter stressful life situations, focusing on how couples adjust to stress is essential for understanding marital establishment. According to Kuppens (2008):
Drawing from the stress immunization theory, which demonstrates that the productive adjustment to moderately stressful occasions may assist individuals to create flexibility to the future stress, the present research demonstrates whether experiences with manageable stressors early in the marriage may serve to make the relationship more flexible to future stress (p.70).
In conclusion, marriages and relationships are disclosed in wider environmental frameworks that at times, analyze how the relationship is resilient. When marital and relationship framework comprises of plentiful stressful life happenings inclusive of work stress or financial difficulties, marriages often encounter an occurrence referred to as stress spillover.
For instance, between matters comparisons of couples facing high versus low levels of external stress demonstrate that couples encountering more severe stress experiences more significant reductions in their marital and relationship satisfaction over the early years of marriage.
Stress in relationships and marriages may occur due to various reasons including fatigue and overworking, internal stress, which occurs as a result of too much worrying over things that nothing can be done to help solve them. In additions, other people get stressed due to environmental stress such as family and crowding, among others. Stress can be reduced and controlled in relationships and marriages through various means.
Perhaps one of the most essential means to a successful relationship includes the relative independence of general fulfillment from immediate occurrences. This is because every intimate relationship faces fluctuations in the daily interactions.
Therefore, to help reduce or control such stress issues in relationships and marriage, couples are encouraged to increase their communication, because good communication helps in alleviating stress in a marriage. Good communication shows that there is honesty, understanding, faithfulness and trust. Couples should also aim at spending more time together in order to reduce tension and get to know and understand each other more.
This habit should be carried out even after many years of marriage. Through this, couples will be enabled to leave behind or forget their daily activities that cause stress and thus just have quality time with each other. In addition, couples should try to balance their lives financially, through time management, and making family budget together. This is because many relationships and marriages break up because of lack of balance.
References
Dale, W. (2003). Once hurt, twice hurtful: How perceived regard regulates daily marital interactions. Journal of personality and social psychology, 84(1),126-147.
Diamond, L. & Hicks, A. (2008). Every time you go away: Changes in affect, behavior, and physiology associated with travel-related separations from romantic partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(2),385-403.
Hellmuth, C. & McNulty, J. (2008). Neuroticism, marital violence, and the moderating role of stress and behavioral skills. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95 (1),166-180.
Kuppens, P. (2008). The role of positive and negative emotions in life satisfaction judgment across nations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(1),66-75.
Neff, L.A. & Karney, B.R. (2009). Stress and reactivity to daily relationship experiences: How stress hinders adaptive processes in marriage. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(3), 435-450.
Neff, L.A. & Broady, E. (2011). Stress resilience in early marriage : can practice make perfect?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(3), 1050-1067.
Powers, S. & Paula, R. (2006). Dating couples’ attachment styles and patterns of cortisol reactivity and recovery in response to a relationship conflict. Journal of Personality nd Social Psychology, 90 (4), 613-628.
Saxbe, D. & Rena, L. (2010). For better or worse? Coregulation of couples’ cortisol levels and mood states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98 (1), 92-103.