Marriage and Anger - Should You Fight Back?

We've all been there.  Everyone on the planet who is in a relationship has times when they get angry, frustrated and fed up. A new study has found that husbands and wives who don't vent their anger when being verbally attacked have a higher risk of early death compared to those who yell scream and let it out.  We all have our own ways of dealing and some are a lot better for our health than others.

The study is to be published in the January 2008 issue of the Journal of Family Communication and was conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan. The research team enlisted 192 couples and followed them over 17 years. The spouses were aged between 35 and 69 years when the study began in 1971.

The couples were individually asked questions about how they dealt with anger in their marriage. They were asked to imagine they were being shouted at by their partner for something that they thought was not their fault, and then say how they would respond.

Anger suppression was defined as doing at least two of the following: not show anger, not object to the attack, feel guilty after showing anger.

The couples were placed into four groups, depending on whether they communicated their anger and resolved conflicts.

Group 1 was where both spouses communicated their anger when they felt unfairly attacked by the other; Groups 2 and 3 were where one spouse communicated and the other suppressed his or her anger; and Groups 4 was where both partners suppressed their anger and brooded.

The researchers found that early death was twice as likely to occur in the group where both partners suppressed their anger, compared to the other three groups.

When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict. Yes, but how many of us really know how to do that?  I guess if we had parents that were good at it, we'd have role models to imitate, but otherwise couples don't know how to make things right.  Our resentments just keep building up until one day they need to escape one way or another.

The key, is learning how to resolve conflict when it happens.

The study only examined anger resulting from attacks that were considered unfair or undeserved by the person on the receiving end. People who perceive the attack as "fair", don't get angry, he said.

In this research 192 couples were followed:

• In 26 of them, both partners suppressed their anger.
• There were 13 deaths over the period of study in that group.
• In the remaining 166 couples, there was a total of 41 deaths (all of the three other groups combined).
• In 27 per cent of the couples where both suppressed anger, one of the partners died, and in 23 per cent, both died, during the study period.
• This compared to just 19 per cent of couples in the remaining three groups where one partner died and 6 per cent where both partners died.

Pretty heavy duty stuff don't you think?  There's not much that I keep inside so I guess I'll be alive and kicking for a long time.