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Personality
When Only One Partner Thinks a Couple's in Trouble
How relationship blindness can break couples apart.
Posted March 12, 2016
You’ve just had yet another disagreement with your partner, and it didn't go well. The coffee spilled all over the countertop because your partner failed to set up the coffeemaker properly. But it’s possible that you may have gone too far with your reaction: “You idiot! Don’t you know how this thing works? What’s wrong with you?"
That was not very pleasant, and you feel a little bad for over-reacting. But after all, you needed that coffee to wake up, and you were just feeling irritable. Your partner will get over it, and things will be fine by evening, you're sure.
Let’s imagine, now, that the roles are reversed and it’s your partner who loses it when you’re the coffee culprit. You wouldn’t expect that extreme a reaction but, on the other hand, your partner does get kind of testy. As much as you try not to let it get to you, though, it makes for some rocky situations where you don’t talk to each other for days.
In these scenarios, it’s possible that the quality of relationship blindness is at work.
When people suffer from this particular interpersonal deficit, they don’t realize how negatively their partner perceives them. As you might imagine, this is not a quality that you can easily identify in yourself. If you’re relationship blind, you believe that everything is okay. In fact, if you had to rate yourself on a relationship quality scale, you’d come out with a pretty high self-evaluation.
Relationship blindness is similar, in a way, to the defense mechanism of denial, in which you are unable to acknowledge your own weaknesses or negative qualities. Denial is notoriously difficult to measure on self-report scales because, by definition, people in denial tend to...deny. As a result, psychologists measure denial by indirect methods, obtaining ratings from people close to the individual or, perhaps, a therapist. Similarly, in relationship blindness, the most valid judgments should theoretically be those other people make, notably the spouse or partner.
Of course, both partners in a relationship may be blind to their problems even as people outside of it see them engaged in constant bickering. Perhaps every time you go to visit your in-laws, they battle over everything from whether the weather is nice to who spent too much on groceries. They’ve been together for over 30 years, and for as long as you’ve known them, have never seemed very happy with each other.
The constant bickerers, both of whom are to blame, may be staying together despite their apparent misery because they have become “conflict-habituated.” You and everyone else are convinced they’re always on the verge of divorce, yet neither of them seems inclined to leave.
When relationship blindness affects only one partner, though, it’s quite a different story. The oblivious partner, by definition, never seems distressed or unhappy. Therefore, he or she may be completely taken by surprise when their partner declares, “I’ve had enough.” As the unhappy partner prepares to end it or move out, the relationally blind partner watches in complete disbelief.
To diagnose relationship blindness in yourself is, of course, impossible. However, there may be ways to identify whether you’re at risk of having this deficit. University of Virginia Christopher Hafen and colleagues (2015) conducted a long-term study of how personality disagreeableness (definition exactly as it sounds) affects relationship quality. They reported the 10-year outcome of being a disagreeable teenager for the quality of relationships as a young adult.
Using an observational measure of disagreeableness based on the adolescent’s interactions with friends, the Hafen team 10 years later examined relationship quality as adult romantic partners and friends rated it. The findings showed a clear directional pathway: the higher the adolescent’s observer-rated disagreeableness, the more their adult partners reported experiencing negative relationship interactions. Particularly telling in the findings was the fact that self-rated relationship quality (by the disagreeable individual) had no long-term predictive value for satisfaction in the current relationship. In other words, disagreeable people just could not see the telltale signs that their relationship (and their partner) was suffering.
What’s particularly informative about this study is that it can’t be faulted for being correlational alone. Although disagreeableness was not subjected to experimental manipulation (i.e., individuals weren’t randomly assigned to be disagreeable or not), it did have long-term predictive power. It’s hardly possible that poor adult relationship quality could have predicted adolescent disagreeableness.
The way to diagnose your own relationship blindness, then, may be to take stock of your own current levels of disagreeableness as well as to reflect back onto your friendships and personality during your youth. Do you tend to be oppositional? Is it difficult for you to compromise with other people? Do you even care what other people think? All of these would be indications of disagreeableness. When you were a kid, was it difficult for you to find people to play with or hang out with? How many times were you invited to parties?
Let’s turn next to indicators of relationship strife that you may be missing. When was the last time you argued with your partner? Who started it? Try to recall your partner’s reaction when things started to go south between the two of you. Did he or she leave the room in, to be honest, what seemed like a huff?
If you seem to emerge from this analysis unscathed, turn the mirror around to your partner. You are probably quite aware of the times that you argue for reasons that aren’t at all clear to you. Perhaps you know something about your partner’s past, as retold to you by relatives. You might even see some signs if you examine that old high school photo album or yearbook.
Assuming that you truly care about your partner, despite the turmoil of constant arguing, this might suggest a path to restoring your relationship’s health. Find a way to bring up the subject without being confrontational or threatening. In a quiet moment, your partner may be more open than you realize to working through and overcoming the old, disagreeable patterns.
It’s fair to propose that disagreeable people don’t like being that way. It’s no fun being left out of things when you’re young, and as an adult, it’s also no fun to experience constant breakups. If you think you fit the criteria for the relationship blind and you are in a relationship, this might be a good time to try to set things straight with your partner. If you can admit to the possibility that you’ve just been unable to see the problems staring your partner in the face, your partner will undoubtedly be willing to help you.
Inviting the people close to you to alert you to the telltale signs of relationship blindness, or to help the people you care about overcome theirs, can help promote the long-term fulfillment we all hope to achieve in our closest relationships.
Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging. Feel free to join my Facebook group, "Fulfillment at Any Age," to discuss today's blog, or to ask further questions about this posting.
Reference
Hafen, C. A., Allen, J. P., Schad, M. M., & Hessel, E. T. (2015). Conflict with friends, relationship blindness, and the pathway to adult disagreeableness. Personality And Individual Differences, 817-12. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2015.01.023
Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2016
