Secret to Romantic
Intimacy: Skip the Nagging

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Health) - Avoiding nagging and yelling in a romantic relationship may be more important for building intimacy than all those thoughtful things you do for your sweetie, new research suggests.

"You want to try to avoid those negative behaviors and not do things you can't take back," said Betty Witcher, an assistant professor of psychology at Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

"If you're yelling, that's going to have more of an effect than doing something nice," she told Reuters Health.

The study, released here at a recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, involved 94 dating couples, all of whom were college students who had been in the relationship for an average of about two years. They completed questionnaires to assess intimacy and conflict within their relationships.

"Positive responses (to conflict) didn't really seem to increase levels of intimacy," Witcher said. "Instead, it was the avoidance of verbal aggression--such as yelling at or insulting a partner--that increased intimacy."

Positive responses included such behaviors as reasoning and discussing issues calmly, she said.

Nagging was another big no-no.

"If people thought that their partner nagged them, then they reported lower intimacy," she said. "People really don't like their partner nagging them."

Witcher said the findings aren't all that surprising given that the majority of the relationships in the study were long-term.

"Most of the couples were dating about two years and had reached a stable level of intimacy," she explained. "So basically, positive responses couldn't raise their intimacy any more but negative behaviors could lower it."

Previous research also has suggested that couples in established relationships tend to be more affected by negative than positive behaviors, according to Witcher.

Aside from damaging the health of the relationship, lovers' quarrels have also been linked to depression, eating disorders, excessive drinking, heart disease and chronic pain, she noted.

Reference Source 89

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