The Right Way to React to Risky Moments in Your Relationship

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We all want to be in a romantic relationship in which we can trust our partner to have our best interests at heart. We want to be with someone who we believe cares about us and would never want to make us feel hurt or rejected.

Most of our partners do care for us deeply and generally are worthy of our trust. However, in any relationship there will be times when our partners behave, even unintentionally, in ways that make us feel rejected or at least make us question their intentions. Perhaps our partner forgets to call or says something insensitive—there are a variety of situations in relationships where our partners behave in ways that put our feelings at risk.

How we respond to these risky situations is an important predictor of how our relationships will fare over the long term. According to the Risk Regulation Model pioneered by Dr. Sandra Murray and her colleagues (Murray, Holmes, & Collins, 2006), when we are confronted with a risky situation in our relationships we have two options that we must balance—the desire to self-protect and the desire to connect with our partners.

Self-protective actions, such as distancing ourselves from a partner or being nasty/retaliatory when we feel hurt, tend to take a toll on our relationships over time and are associated with reductions in our partner’s feelings of commitment and satisfaction. In contrast, connection-seeking actions, such as communicating clearly and expressing affection, are associated with enhanced closeness, commitment, and satisfaction over time.

Essentially, when we feel like we are at risk in our relationships, self-protections may feel good in the moment, but over time, seeking connection is what benefits our relationships.

Unfortunately, the very people who most need and desire the feelings of closeness associated with happy romantic relationships are also more likely to behave in ways that ultimately damage that closeness. Individuals who are low in self-esteem are significantly more likely to respond to risky situations in their relationships with damaging self-protective behaviors than higher self-esteem counterparts. Low self-esteem individuals often perceive rejection when their partner’s behavior is not overtly hurtful (e.g., Bellavia & Murray, 2003), and they often respond to this perceived rejection or hurt by distancing themselves from their partners or lashing out at them (e.g., Cavallo, Holmes, Fitzsimons, Murray, & Wood, 2012).

However, recent research has identified an encouraging new pathway by which the destructive behaviors to which low self-esteem individuals are prone can be bypassed in risky situations. Murray and colleagues (Murray, Gomillion, Holmes, & Harris, 2015) conducted a 14-day study in which they found that on days when low self-esteem individuals were uncertain of their partner’s caring for them (risky situations), individuals who possessed more positive "automatic attitudes" about their partner perceived their partner as less selfish and rejecting. They also were less rejecting, or self-protective, in their interactions with their partner—and their partner, in turn, was less rejecting toward them.

What is an automatic attitude? Automatic attitudes are the sum total of our evaluative experiences with any particular thing in the world (Banaji & Heiphetz, 2010). These are feelings that we hold toward people or objects—often without having to put much conscious thought into what the feelings are or why we hold them—that determine our relevant motivations and behaviors. Thus, our automatic attitudes toward our partners encompass the aggregate of our overall experiences in our relationships over time, rather than in any specific moment.

These findings clearly demonstrate that our perceptions of and behaviors toward our partner directly contribute to how our partners behave toward us. Beyond this, these findings offer a hopeful outlook on one way that low self-esteem individuals may be able to bypass default tendencies that are destructive to their relationships when they feel vulnerable and rejected.

Banaji, M. R., & Heiphetz, L. (2010). Attitudes. Handbook of social psychology.

Bellavia, G., & Murray, S. (2003). Did I do that? Self-esteem-related differences in reactions to romantic partners' moods. Personal Relationships, 10(1), 77-95.

Cavallo, J. V., Holmes, J. G., Fitzsimons, G. M., Murray, S. L., & Wood, J. V. (2012). Managing motivational conflict: how self-esteem and executive resources influence self-regulatory responses to risk. Journal of personality and social psychology, 103(3), 430.

Murray, S. L., Gomillion, S., Holmes, J. G., & Harris, B. (2015). Inhibiting Self-Protection in Romantic Relationships Automatic Partner Attitudes as a Resource for Low Self-Esteem People. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(2), 173-182.

Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Collins, N. L. (2006). Optimizing assurance: the risk regulation system in relationships. Psychological bulletin, 132(5), 641.