If managing the flooding of your house is extremely upsetting, even sometimes traumatic, natural disasters can also resolve couples who are struggling.
- The peak of the flood of the Garonne in Gironde was reached this Thursday morning at La Réole, at 8.43 meters.
- Météo France still places three departments on orange flood alert today.
While floods are ravaging the South-West of France, a new study published in the journal Psychological Science has just shown that this kind of ordeal can, against all odds, strengthen a couple.
Hurricane Harvey
The research is particularly interesting because it actually adapted to an unexpected event: Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas in late August 2017. Basically, scientists were studying the impact of everyday stressors on recently married couples.
“In a way, I really had no choice but to look into the effects of the hurricane, because it happened in the middle of our longitudinal study,” says the author of the essay Hannah Williamson, who immediately saw the opportunity to test a new research method. “Multiple articles had already studied the impact of traumatic events on relationships, but no researcher had individual data collected before and after the disaster”, she explains.
So his team selected 231 newlywed couples from Harris County, Texas, making sure they had varying living standards. She then had them complete six questionnaires between February 2015 and March 2019, to assess how satisfied they were with their relationship.
“Our partners are important”
It should be noted that the members of the cohort were all very happy with their romantic situation at the start of the experiment. After two and a half years, the researchers observed that people tended to be less satisfied with their relationship… Until Hurricane Harvey arrived! The disaster then temporarily boosted the couples, especially those who were in the worst condition.
“This study ultimately shows that it’s easy to get bogged down in small daily annoyances, and that one extremely disruptive event can help us realize how important our partners are to us,” Hannah Williamson Williamson told PsyPost. “I think it would be good for relationships if we could find a way to get that shift in perspective without having to go through a traumatic event.” she concludes.
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