Couples and Health Behaviors
Healthy couple relationships have powerful influences on people’s health. For many adults, romantic partners are their most important source of emotional and social support, and social support is one of the most well-documented factors contributing to mental and physical health. Therefore, we believe that efforts to promote and support healthy romantic relationships represent an important way to support health.
In our work, we have documented associations between romantic involvement (simply being in a romantic relationship) and psychological wellbeing in college students and in adolescents and young adults who identify as sexual and gender minorities. We have also shown that the quality of a romantic relationships (e.g., how satisfying it is) is associated with lower depressive symptoms in college students, cohabiting and married women, and same-gender couples.
These beliefs underlie much of our work developing healthy relationship education programs for sexual and gender minorities, which we believe may help reduce the physical and mental health disparities they face.
In addition, romantic partners can have powerful influences on each other’s health behaviors, such as eating, exercise, and smoking. In fact, effective support from a spouse is a strong predictor of success when trying to make a health behavior change, like losing weight or quitting smoking. We developed PACT to harness the power of the couple relationship to help improve success rates of standard smoking cessation treatments.