The Stress of Dating in the Golden Years
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Brand new relationships. They're thrilling, awkward, maybe a little chaotic. Two lives colliding while everything else seems to disappear into the background. But new research shows for older folks, the romantic turbulence of a new romance can trigger surprisingly intense physical and emotional stress. So if you are dating in your golden years, you're going to want to beware. You're going to want to listen up. I am here with human development and family sciences professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Lisa Neff. Lisa, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Look, people say age brings wisdom, and I think that applies to relationships like fewer arguments, more emotional control. What made you suspect this could possibly fall apart when older folks start dating and enter new relationships?
Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, generally aging comes with some pretty important benefits that we develop what's been called socio-emotional expertise. We are better at navigating those interpersonal tensions that are inevitable in our relationships. We're better at regulating our emotions. Older adults more so than younger adults, more likely to be generous in their interpretations of their partner's bad behaviors. They're going to give their partner the benefit of the doubt more so than younger adults. And also part of socio-emotional expertise is that as we get older, we're really motivated to maintain harmonious relationships. We realign our priorities as we get older. We start to have a recognition that relationships are really the heart of it all.
What surprising toll do new relationships take on older adults?
And so that is something we really prioritize. The problem is... those processes of avoiding or minimizing those everyday tensions can be difficult in those early stages of a relationship. There's something known as the relational turbulence model, which suggests that as we're establishing a committed relationship, basically two people are merging their lives together, right? They're becoming more interdependent. They're having to coordinate their daily routines and compromise on their daily activities. And that's an opportunity where tensions are more likely to crop up. And so it is a time in a relationship where it can be especially hard to avoid or minimize tensions, unlike in longer standing relationships when you've been with that person for decades, you really get good at picking your battles, you know what to expect.
In those new relationships, you're still getting to know each other and it can be harder to avoid those landmines and avoid those tensions on a day-to-day basis. I mean, I guess it follows that dating is exhausting at any age. Because when I have been single and I just enter a relationship, I don't know, all the new stuff you got to do, all the stress of it, all the worry, it really sweeps you up. It really is exhausting. I'd like to think that wouldn't happen for older folks, but I guess it does. Yeah, so it does happen for, it happens for everybody. Relationships are hard for everybody, no matter the age. The issue that we found in our research is that because older adults are so strongly motivated to avoid negativity and to maintain those harmonious relationships, when they have difficulty doing that, such as
When you're just getting to know someone in the early stages of a new relationship, that inability to avoid those tensions can take a greater toll on older adults than it does on younger adults. Is it because stress kind of hits the body, hits the mind harder as we age and new relationships, it would seem, are inherently stressful? Exactly. So, I mean, many of us have noticed as we get older and if we injure ourselves, it takes longer to recover from that injury as we get older. The same thing is true with stress. When we experience those stressors, it can linger in the body more.
How does age influence emotional control in relationships?
It just takes a little bit longer to get over it. And so older adults, when they're unable to avoid or minimize tensions in their relationship, when those tensions happen, it can take a bigger toll on them.
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