Pressure to not feel bad among (different-sex) romantic partners: prevalence, and correlates

ABSTRACT

Western society generally highly values happiness. As a result, people sometimes experience pressure not to feel negative emotions. In this study, we comprehensively investigated this pressure, and how it manifests itself, in adult romantic relationships. Specifically, we first examined when, how often and how intensely people experience pressure not to feel bad from their romantic partners (94 different-sex couples). Additionally, we investigated (both between- and within-person) how this pressure is related to context (presence of, contact and or conflict with a partner), emotional processes (i.e. experienced sadness and anxiety, emotion suppression, and how their partner perceived their affect), and relationship well-being. Using experience sampling methodology data (6/14 reports per day over one week) we found that although participants generally did not experience strong pressure from their partner, they experienced some feelings of pressure about 50% of the time. Furthermore, within-person predictors associated with negative processes/emotions (i.e. negative emotions, conflict, emotion suppression) were related to the momentary frequency (odds) and/or intensity of perceived pressure not to feel bad. At the between-person level, individuals who experience more sadness, anxiety and reported suppressing their emotions more often tended to experience more and/or stronger pressure. Only weak associations with relationship well-being were found.

KEYWORDS:

• Pressure to not feel bad
• Romantic relationships
• Negative emotions
• Cultural norms
• Experience sampling

Acknowledgements

Within-person analyses and hypotheses of this study were post-registered and can be found together with the materials and code for analyses on the following link: https://osf.io/u94f3. At this time the data is not publicly available due to institutional privacy regulations for this type of data. Conceptualisation: OV, LS, EC, LV, GL & PK; Data curation: PK, EC, LS; Formal analysis: OV, GL, EC, PK; Funding acquisition: PK, EC & LV; Investigation: OV, PK, EC, LS; Methodology: OV, PK, EC, LS, GL; Project administration: LS, PK, EC; Resources: PK, EC, LV; Software: OV, PK, EC, GL; Supervision: PK, EC, LV; Validation: OV, PK, EC, GL; Visualisation: OV, PK, EC, GL; Writing – Original draft: OV; Writing – review and editing: OV, PK, EC, LV, LS, GL.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Most within-person (and those related to perceived relationship quality and relationship satisfaction) hypotheses and analyses were post-registered on https://osf.io/u94f3. All between-person analyses were conducted on request of a reviewer of this article, and therefore were not registered beforehand.

2 When we say frequency, we refer to the log odds ratio of reporting zero pressure not to feel sad or anxious as opposed to reporting pressure exceeding zero. A “higher frequency” would then mean that increases in the predictor variable are associated with a lower log odds ratio of reporting no pressure as opposed to higher than three.

3 When we say intensity, we refer to the strength of association with a predictor given that the reported pressure exceeded three.

4 Note that usually in logistic regression Y_ij = 1 is predicted, while in two-parts mixed effect models we predict Y_ij =  0.

5 We also conducted analyses where we tried to estimate the within- and between-person effects concurrently (within the same model), but these models were too complex for the data at hand.

6 As discussed in the analyses, we modelled the likelihood of the outcome being zero instead of one, so to be complete one should say that people were equally likely to not experience any pressure. For readability of the result section we do not mention this every time when reporting results.

7 Again, they actually report experiencing no pressure less often, but to increase readability this was rephrased.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by VLIR IBOF Funding 21/090 and Research Council [grant number C14/19/054]. Laura Sels is funded by an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow Mandate [grant number 12ZN523N].