This One Factor In Your Relationship Could Significantly Affect Your Wellbeing

The study centered around the Strong Couples Project, which is available free of charge to couples in the US. It’s billed as “free, proven online help for your relationship”, and includes six online courses and five video calls with a coach. 

The 170 couples enrolled in this study were either married, engaged, or cohabiting. They completed questionnaires before starting the program, just after it finished, and six months later.

The researchers, graduate student Noah Larsen and assistant professor Allen Barton of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, were focused on three components of the Strong Couples program: partner support, better communication, and increased relationship confidence. 

“Relationship confidence involves the belief that my partner and I can handle whatever challenges come our way and build a lasting future together,” Larsen explained in a statement. “It involves trusting that our relationship will continue and feeling assured that we have the skills to manage conflicts and keep the relationship strong.”

Confidence, as well as communication and partner support, is a subject that comes up time and time again in these types of counselling programs, broadly known as couple and relationship education (CRE). But, Larsen and Barton write in their paper, “few studies to date have considered program factors that account for change in these individual domains among CRE participants.”

After reviewing the existing literature, the pair analyzed the data collected from the 170 couples. While all three key factors were found to be important to a healthy relationship, confidence came out on top as having the largest impact on individual wellbeing. Higher confidence was associated with a significant improvement in mental health and sleep. 

These results applied to all participants regardless of demographic factors like age, income, education, and gender.

The only slight difference observed among the couples was that married couples experienced greater improvements in relationship confidence by the end of the program. 

“Marriage often comes with a long-term commitment to the relationship. When couples reflect on that commitment and their shared future, it can strengthen their confidence in the relationship even more,” Larsen suggested.

There were some limitations to the study, such as the lack of a control group and the relatively short follow-up period. There’s also the fact that, as with a lot of research like this, the authors were relying on self-reporting from the participants, which is prone to bias. 

And while they point out that these results cannot necessarily be said to generalize to all CRE programs, Larsen and Barton write that the work adds to the growing body of research on the benefits of CRE and shows that a focus on relationship confidence could be a helpful thing to build into future programs. 

“Past research has looked at different factors that might explain why these programs are helping couples’ relationships,” said Larsen. “But we thought it was remarkable that relationship education also benefits people's individual health, and we wanted to find out what might explain this.”

The study is published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.