A UK-based study has found that on days when people face more non-relationship stress — such as demanding days at work, traffic snarls or mounting bills — their feelings of love, passion and closeness toward their partner tend to dip. The research, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, involved 100 romantic couples from a large city in Britain and was led by Ece Yilmaz of the University of Ottawa with Sarah C. E. Stanton of the University of Edinburgh.
Non-relationship stress refers to pressures and hassles that begin outside the couple, such as heavy workloads, transit problems, family disagreements, and unexpected bills. Although these events do not originate in the partnership itself, the emotional strain from the outside world can spill into home life as well.
Relationship scientists have long noted external pressures are linked to lower relationship satisfaction. Earlier work also showed that people who had experienced more stressful life events were more alert to day-to-day changes in their partner’s negative behaviours, even as stress did not predict perceptions of positive behaviours.
The new study sought to tease apart how love, passion and intimacy—core emotional components of relationships—respond to non-relationship stress, and whether cross-over effects occur between partners. It was conducted with 100 couples living in a large city in the United Kingdom, aged 18 to 64 (average around 24), who had been together for three months to more than 35 years. About 87 were mixed-gender couples and 13 were same-gender or gender-diverse; roughly 70 per cent were students.
Participants completed a laboratory session to gather background data, then answered brief online surveys each evening for 14 consecutive days, independently and without discussing responses with their partner.
The daily surveys tracked non-relationship stress via a checklist of ten common hassles, plus mood ratings. Each day, participants also evaluated how much love, passion and closeness they felt using a seven-point scale.
Analyses used statistical models designed for couples to separate within-person daily patterns from between-person differences and to test whether a partner’s stress crossed over. The researchers looked at whether people with higher average stress over the two weeks reported lower romantic feelings, whether daily spikes in outside stress correlated with lower feelings on that day, and whether one partner’s stress affected the other’s feelings.
The findings showed that on days when an individual experienced more non-relationship stress than usual, their feelings of love, passion, and intimacy toward their partner were lower that evening. The associations were small: each additional hassle beyond a person’s usual level was linked to about 0.04 to 0.13 points lower on the seven-point scale, though the authors caution these tiny effects could accumulate over time.
In contrast, people who generally carried more daily stress across the study period did not report significantly lower average love, passion or intimacy than those with less stress. The authors suggest that those who are consistently stressed may have learned coping strategies, though coping was not measured in the study.
“It was surprising to see that people who experience more stress than others did not report lower levels of love, passion, and intimacy,” Yilmaz explained. “This indicates that the negative effects of external stress are related to one experiencing more stress than usual and not related to their general stress level. In other words, if you are usually stressed you know how to cope with it and it does not impact your relationship as much. But if you are experiencing more stress than usual, you also feel lower love, passion, and intimacy in your relationship.”
In the primary models, a partner’s daily or average stress levels were not statistically significant direct predictors of how the other person felt. “Additionally, there were no significant partner effects,” Yilmaz noted. “This means that the external stress your partner is going through does not impact your feelings of love, passion, and intimacy in your relationship.”
Daily mood showed strong connections to relationship feelings, with a worse mood tied to lower daily passion and intimacy and a better mood tied to higher passion and intimacy. In exploratory analyses, the researchers found patterns consistent with a sequence in which more outside stress was linked to lower positive mood and higher negative mood, which were in turn linked to weaker romantic feelings. A partner’s stress also showed up indirectly: it was linked to a person’s own mood, which was in turn linked to their romantic feelings.
These observations align with an investigation of momentary desire, which examined momentary sexual desire and arousal rather than broader daily feelings of love, passion, and intimacy, and similarly found that higher stress in the moment was linked to lower sexual desire and arousal.
“The main takeaway is that experiencing stress unrelated to one’s relationship is still connected to one’s romantic relationship,” Yilmaz emphasised. “If you are feeling lower love, passion, and intimacy towards your partner, this may be due to the external stress you are experiencing. And this is especially true if you are experiencing higher levels of stress than usual. These findings could be helpful for people going through stressful times to understand that the reduced feelings in their relationship might not be about their relationship as much as they think.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The participants in this sample were mostly young and in early-stage relationships lasting an average of 2.8 years, with 85.5 per cent dating rather than married or in a civil partnership and only 38 per cent living together. On the seven-point scale, average daily love was roughly 6.6, and participants reported about one outside hassle per day on average.
Because 85.5 per cent of participants were White and 80 per cent identified as heterosexual, the patterns might look different in more diverse samples. And because most couples reported high levels of love, the authors note the results may not extend to couples experiencing chronic relationship distress.
The way stress was measured also presents an important consideration. The researchers used a checklist that recorded whether certain stressful events happened, but it did not measure how overwhelming or intense each event felt to the person experiencing it. Missing a bus or having an extra chore does not feel the same to everyone, and capturing subjective severity could provide a fuller picture of how strain relates to romance.
Because the study tracked daily ratings rather than manipulating stress in a controlled experiment, the design cannot confirm direct cause and effect. It remains possible that underlying feelings of exhaustion or subtle changes in partner interactions influenced both how people perceived stress and how they rated their relationship, or that a bad day in the relationship led people to report more outside hassles, such as arguments with family. Future investigations could follow couples across longer periods and examine whether psychological resources, such as emotion regulation skills, help buffer romantic bonds against outside pressures.
The study, “Is Love Gone or Are You Stressed? Examining Daily Associations Between Non-relationship Stress and Love, Passion, and Intimacy in Couple Relationships,” was authored by Ece Yilmaz and Sarah C. E. Stanton.
