Emotional Intelligence and Intimate Relationships
Julie Fitness, Macquarie University (1)
Introduction
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the marriage cup
Whenever you’re wrong,
admit it
Whenever you’re right,
shut up
(Ogden Nash, 1962)
According to Ogden Nash, the secret to a long and
happy marriage is relatively simple: know when to say sorry, and
don’t "rub it in" when your partner is in the
wrong. Like so many clever aphorisms, however, its simplicity is
deceptive. In fact, the art of knowing when, why, and how to say
sorry in marriage, and the ability to practise forbearance under
even the most trying circumstances, require a number of
sophisticated emotional skills, including empathy, self-control,
and a highly serviceable understanding of human needs and
feelings. The interesting point about these skills is how
remarkably similar they are to the proposed ingredients of
so-called "emotional intelligence", defined by Mayer
and Salovey (1997) as "the ability to perceive emotions, to
access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to
understand emotions and emotion knowledge, and to reflectively
regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual
growth" (p. 5). Indeed, this striking congruence between the
kinds of abilities involved in emotional intelligence, and the
kinds of abilities apparently required to successfully negotiate
marital ups and downs, suggests that if ever there were a context
in which emotional intelligence might be expected to matter, it
is marriage. But in what ways is so-called emotional intelligence
important to marriage? And what kinds of emotional skills do
spouses need to help them weather the vicissitudes of married
life?
The concept of emotional intelligence has been enthusiastically
received in the popular press, with many espousing it as the
recipe for success in every sphere of life. Despite the
often-extravagant claims made for its beneficial qualities,
however, scientific data on the features and outcomes of
emotional intelligence are only beginning to emerge in the
psychological literature. Furthermore, although theorists have
emphasized the importance of emotional intelligence in intimate
relationships, and speculated that more emotionally intelligent
people should have longer and happier marriages, there has been
little scientific research examining emotional intelligence in
the marital context. No doubt this paucity of research is a
function both of the newness of the construct and of difficulties
in finding reliable and valid measures of it. Nonetheless,
psychologists have investigated other emotional phenomena in the
context of marital happiness and stability, many of which would
be considered to involve aspects of emotional intelligence: for
example, emotional perception and expression, empathy, and
emotion knowledge and understanding.
The overall aim of this chapter is to discuss some of this
investigative work in light of current thinking about emotional
intelligence. Specifically, after a brief description of the
proposed facets of emotional intelligence, I will review research
findings from the marital literature with regard to each of the
facets, paying particular attention to gender and individual
differences. I will also discuss whether emotional intelligence,
as currently conceived, is necessarily adaptive in marriage; and
finally, I will examine whether the construct of emotional
intelligence itself has anything new or useful to offer scholars
with an interest in marital happiness and stability.
Conclusions
The literature reviewed in this chapter reveals a relatively
long-standing and rich tradition of psychological research on
emotions in the context of marital relationships. In particular,
marital researchers have demonstrated that the better spouses are
at perceiving, accurately identifying, regulating, and expressing
emotions, the happier their relationships are. These findings are
consistent with the hypothesis, derived from the emotional
intelligence literature, that people differ in their abilities to
accurately perceive, identify, and express emotions, understand
and reason about emotions, and effectively regulate and manage
emotions. Thus it may be argued that the marital literature
supports the suggestion that some individuals are indeed more
"emotionally intelligent" than others. Moreover, these
differences in emotion-related abilities are reliably associated
with what may be considered an adaptive and desirable life
outcome: marital happiness and stability.
With respect to whether or not the construct of emotional
intelligence has anything new or useful to offer marital
researchers, this will likely depend on what progress is made in
more precisely defining and measuring it. Specifically, scholars
need to come to some agreement on the constituents of emotional
intelligence, and to decide whether it would make more
theoretical sense to conceptualize people’s emotion-related
abilities as inter-related but separable competencies, rather
than as a unitary form of intelligence. In a related vein,
scholars also need to devise more reliable ways of measuring
emotional intelligence, or emotion-related abilities. In
particular, they need to find ways of measuring people’s
abilities to clearly express their own emotions and to accurately
interpret others’ emotions; abilities that marital
researchers have shown to be especially important in adaptive
interpersonal functioning (see also Ciarrochi et al., this
volume).
One final point worth making is that emotional intelligence is
currently conceived as an exclusively intra-personal mental
ability; however, as the research in this chapter has
demonstrated, emotions like anger, guilt, jealousy, and love, are
profoundly interpersonal phenomena that are played out over time
between individuals. Indeed, it could even be argued that
people’s emotion accuracy, expressiveness, understanding,
and regulation only come to life within interpersonal and
relational settings. Emotional intelligence theorists, then,
might well look to the marital literature for data and
theoretical insights about adaptive emotion functioning,
particularly in the context of real-time behavioral interactions.
However, emotional intelligence scholars also have a potentially
important contribution to make toward enhancing our understanding
of adaptive emotion functioning in marriage. For example,
research using the Trait Meta-Mood Scale suggests that the
accurate perception and understanding of how emotions like anger,
shame, guilt, and love unfold over time may play an important
role in the maintenance of satisfying long-term relationships,
though we are a long way from understanding how the two are
linked.
Clearly, emotion and close relationship scholars have much to
offer one another with respect to theoretical insights and
methodological expertise. It is to be hoped that in the future
these researchers will work together to build more dynamic models
of the features, predictors, and outcomes of emotional
intelligence in emotion-rich contexts like marriage.
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1. Fitness, J. (2001). Emotional intelligence and intimate relatoinships. In J. Ciarrochi, J. P. Forgas, & J. D. Mayer (Eds.) Emotional Intelligence and Everyday Life (pp.xi-xviii). New York: Psychology Press.
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