The findings of a new study of online relationship support suggest that men tend to experience emotional pain more than women when their relationship takes a turn for the worse.
The study and its results have been published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. An team of psychologists led by researchers at Lancaster University conducted the first-ever “big data” analysis of relationship problems. The study began as an attempt to create a map of most common relationship problems people experienced outside clinical and counselling settings.
“Most of what we know about relationship problems comes from studies of people in couples therapy, which includes a rather specific subset of people — people who have the time, money, and motive to work on their relationship problems,” said Charlotte Entwistle, lead author.
Using natural language processing methods, the team analyzed the demographic and psychological characteristics of over 184,000 people who posted their relationship problems to an anonymous online forum. The researchers were able to statistically determine the most common themes that came up across each post, creating a “map” of most common relationship problems.
Results showed that communication problems were the #1 most frequent problem mentioned, with nearly 1 in 5 people noting difficulty discussing problems, and 1 in 8 mentioning trust issues in their relationships.
Analyses revealed that the most common theme mentioned by people talking about their relationship problems was about the emotional pain caused by the problems, rather than the problems themselves. The most common theme was about “heartache” and was comprised of words like regret, breakup, cry, and heartbroken.“We realized that this was an important opportunity to put common ideas about gender differences in relationships to the test,” said Dr Ryan Boyd, the lead researcher.