In itself, this is no new insight, and it makes sense that understanding your partner and looking for mutual solutions is healthier than looking to win the argument or change them. But new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that quite aside from any practical value of understanding, simply feeling understood can nullify conflict’s impact – or even allow it to improve relationships.

Amie Gordon and Serena Chen at the University of California conducted several studies with participants recruited through online research pools, most of whom were in their twenties and thirties; all were in an ongoing relationship with at least six months behind it. The first survey-based study showed that the higher the frequency of conflicts in a relationship, the less satisfying it was to participants – unless they felt that their partner understood them well (feeling understood was measured by agreement with statements like  “My partner nearly always knows exactly what I mean”).

In the second study, participants who wrote about a specific conflict that had occurred in their current relationship articulated a lower satisfaction within that relationship immediately post-conflict, compared with a control group who wrote about a neutral event – if, and only if, they were asked to consider a conflict where their partner didn’t understand them. This suggests that conflict needn’t be harmful to a relationship if it occurs in the context of feeling understood. To read more from Alex Fradera, click here.