Dealing with conflicts in premarital relationships

My last blog post was all about relationships in this modern liquid and emotionally unstable world, but this time I want to say something about conflicts in intimate relationships; the perceptions of conflicts and their endings of males and females. Some time ago I came across a research that dealt with above mentioned subject – Sally A. Lloyd’s article “Conflict in Premarital Relationships: Differential Perceptions of Males and Females”. In her research she included 50 premarital partners (25 couples) which completed behavioral self-report assessments of the number and characteristics of conflicts over a 14-day period. Each couple completed a relationship questionnaire and was trained how to keep disagreement records. The questionnaire contained scales that measured relationship quality (love, satisfaction and commitment) and communication quality (hostility of partner’s communication, self-disclosure anxiety and use of negotiation versus manipulation).

The results of this research are presented in three categories; the conflict and relationship quality, conflict and communication quality and conflict endings.

“Males reported the negative relation of relationship quality to the stability of issues brought up by their partners, on the other side females’ reports that relationship qualities are positively related to the resolution of such conflicts. For females the lower the level of resolution of self initiated conflict, the greater the perceived stability of the conflict issue, but if a conflict is perceived to be unresolved, it may be brought up again. On the other hand males do not connect how often the issue has been brought up by the partner with the resolution of the issue.”
“At this point the author mentions the cycle – becomes one of the female partner initiating a conflict repeatedly in order to get the underlying issue resolved (and to increase her relationship quality), while at the same time the male partner’s perception that she has initiated a conflict on an issue that has come up over and over serves to decrease his perceived relationship quality. This proves, Lloyd claims that males appear to be conflict-avoidant and females to be conflict-confrontive. But how this cycle of conflict can be interrupted? The negotiation use is related in important ways to conflict processes. Both males and females who reported using negotiation reported fewer conflicts, in addition males’ perceived conflicts to be less stable and females to be more resolved. Here we have to mention that hostility also evidenced important relationships to conflict. Hostility and conflict intensity may form a reciprocal relationship – the greater hostility the conflict seems to be more intensive. Here we have to add that for men higher self-disclosure anxiety is associated with greater perceived resolution of conflicts, for females is vice versa.”

At the end I have to say, that even if this research is dated 1987 I think that there are several similarities in how males and females were dealing and perceiving relationship conflicts then, and how they do it now.

Lloyd A., Sally. 1987. Conflict in Premarital Relationships: Differential Perceptions of Males and Females. Family Relations, vol. 36, no. 3, 290-294. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/583542 (19th November 2009).