This week’s title might sound like a contradiction, but emotions interact in complicated and mysterious ways. Deeply negative feelings can create space for powerful positive feelings to emerge. Occasionally, a personal tragedy will start with sorrow but evolve into a renewed appreciation for life.
Longitudinal studies—studies that monitor people over multiple points in time—are difficult to run in the context of tragedies. To understand how people feel before and after a tragedy, you need to know when the tragic event will occur so you can plan the timing of your experiment, and that’s usually not possible.
However, longitudinal data is essential if you really want to understand how a person’s emotional life changes following a tragedy. To give us those insights in the context of relationships, one recent study turned a chance occurrence with one of America’s biggest natural disasters into an opportunity to collect valuable data.
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💍 When Harvey hit the newlyweds
In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas, causing $125 billion worth of damage and killing over 100 people. As far as US tropical cyclones go, it was second only to Hurricane Katrina in the destruction it left behind.
That certainly qualifies as a major tragedy, and it interrupted a study being conducted by Hannah Williamson at University of Texas at Austin. She had recruited 231 newlyweds to investigate how their relationships would develop over the early years of a marriage. Every 9 months from 2015 to 2017, she measured their relationship satisfaction. At the third assessment, she also collected data on their levels of stress and how much social support they had available.
After Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, she continued to follow up with the couples every 6 months for a final three assessments. Altogether, the research team had data across a total of 6 timepoints: 3 right before the onset of the hurricane, and 3 in the aftermath. So how different did things look before vs after Harvey?
People reported high relationship satisfaction early on in their marriage but ratings gradually declined over the first couple of follow-up assessments. This isn’t too surprising. Once the idealism of a newly committed relationship dies down, couples embrace the challenges that come with trying to create a happy home and healthy life. And nobody ever said that would be easy.
But interestingly, right after the hurricane, people saw a little positive blip in their relationship satisfaction. On average, just before the hurricane hit, people were giving their relationship around 40 out of a possible 60 satisfaction points. In the first assessment after the hurricane hit, relationship satisfaction rose around 3 points, bucking the prior trend of declining satisfaction over time before the hurricane arrived.
After that assessment though, things quickly returned to normal. Satisfaction began declining again, soon returning to its pre-hurricane levels. The shared trauma created a real but temporary moment of togetherness.
It’s not yet clear why trauma can have this kind of positive impact on a relationship. It could be a heightened sense of empathy for what each person in the relationship is going through, or perhaps the traumatic circumstance refreshes a sense of mutual gratitude and appreciation as couples narrowly escape a major loss.
Regardless of the precise mechanisms at work, joy and love can emerge from the ashes of suffering. The fact that these positive emotions don’t last long relates to how humans adapt to life transitions (you can read more about the science of adaptation in my previous newsletter titled “The Grass Isn’t Always Greener”). New emotional circumstances quickly become new normals.
Adaptation is a great thing when it helps us overcome and forget suffering. But in the same way, it can also make us forget the reasons we have to feel joy in each moment. When we get through a devastating hurricane unscathed, we feel relieved, elated, and more loving to each other. But soon enough, even when nothing else changes and we have no reason to stop feeling so good, the sands of time inevitably reset our brains to their regular old baselines as we continue to search for the next high.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
Listen to the Stoics: One great lesson from the Stoics is that it’s healthy to contemplate loss and even death. There’s a lot of truth to phrases like “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone”. In everyday life, we get too used to the blessings in life and only realize how wonderful they are once they’re absent from our life again. The good news is you can recognize and appreciate what you have while you still have it by actively visualizing how you would feel if you lost it. Whether it’s a relationship, a happy experience, your good health, or anything else that helps you live a good life, don’t forget that it could be gone one day. You can find more life principles from the Stoics by reading a great book by William B. Irvine titled “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy”.
Emotions can be confusing: A classic research study in the 70s showed that men crossing a scary suspension bridge easily confuse feelings of fearful arousal with feelings of sexual arousal when they’re interviewed by a female experimenter on that bridge. Under normal circumstances, it seems surprising that people could ever confuse two feelings that mean such different things. But in reality, there’s great overlap in how different emotions feel, and we simply interpret their meaning through context. Keep this in mind when you feel negative emotions like fear, anxiety, anger, or sadness. You can experiment with mentally reinterpreting those emotions (e.g. “anxiety helps me focus and avoid mistakes”, “I’m angry because I’m passionate about this and that’s a good thing”) and examining how those framing adjustments affect the way you feel.
Try to see the good in everything: Without meaning to sound too idealistic, there’s frequently a silver lining to the problems in our lives. If natural disasters can positively stimulate relationships, then perhaps we can find unexpected positives in other life challenges too.
💡 A final quote
“That man lives badly who does not know how to die well.”
~ Seneca
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📬 I love to hear from readers. Reach out any time with comments or questions.
👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD