It started as a simple conversation about a child’s birthday party. But it quickly escalated into a full-blown marital rift. She accused him of neglecting the family. He said she was yelling.
“Whatever,” she said. “Go. Go.”
“Go where?” he replied.
“I don’t know,” she told him. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
The bickering parents were among 43 couples taking part in an Ohio State University study exploring how marital interactions influence a person’s health. Every couple in the study — just like couples in the real world — had experienced some form of routine marital conflict. Hot-button topics included managing money, spending time together as a family or an in-law intruding on the relationship.
But while marital spats were universal among the couples, how they handled them was not. Some couples argued constructively and even with kindness, while others — like the couple fighting about the birthday party — were hostile and negative.
What made the difference? The hostile couples were most likely to be those who weren’t getting much sleep.
“When people have slept less, it’s a little like looking at the world through dark glasses,” said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a longtime relationship scientist and director of the Ohio State Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research. “Their moods are poorer. We’re grumpier. Lack of sleep hurts the relationship.”
The men and women in the study had been married from three to 27 years. They reported varying amounts of sleep — anywhere from three and a half to nine hours a night. Each couple made two visits to the lab, where the partners were prodded to talk about the issues that caused the most conflict in their relationship. Then the researchers analyzed videos of their exchanges using well-established scoring techniques to assess positive and negative interactions and hostile and constructive responses. After all the data were parsed, a clear pattern emerged.
Couples were more likely to be hostile — like the couple fighting about the child’s birthday party — when both partners were functioning on less than seven hours of sleep.
Notably, the couples with more than seven hours of sleep still argued with each other, but the tone of their conflict was different. Consider this couple discussing concerns about spending and budget challenges.
“Do you want to try taking over the budget?”
“I can’t. I don’t want to.”
“I understand.”
“You’re just being too accepting. You can tell me I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy.”
Although the couple had indicated they regularly argued about money issues, getting adequate sleep seemed to give them the patience to approach conflict in a constructive way.
