The breakup rate of couples has increased sharply. Is it related to the closure of cinemas?

Are you always cursed to break up after three years of dating? The passion is cooling down quickly, and after a dull day, conflicts break out over trivial matters. Do you want to get back the original feeling?

According to statistics, 25% of emotional breakdowns occur four to five years after a relationship begins. Receiving professional emotional counseling such as conflict management and empathy training can help couples communicate effectively and maintain a better relationship. Do you want to take your partner to see a psychologist?

Wait! Maybe you don't need to spend a lot of money on psychological counseling. Why go to so much trouble when a few movies can solve the problem?

Five movies a month

Can bring benefits for more than three years

Ronald Rogge, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, designed an experiment that selected four groups of newlyweds. Within a month, two of the couples received professional emotional counseling interventions, while the third group did not receive emotional counseling. Instead, they were asked to watch five romantic movies together and have a 30-45 minute guided discussion after watching the movies. The fourth group served as a control group and received no intervention.

Watching a movie can almost achieve the same effect as professional emotional counseling | unsplash

The results showed that both professional counseling and watching the movie reduced the divorce rate to 11%, compared to the 24% divorce rate in the control group within three years. Watching the movie was almost as effective as professional relationship counseling, but with the added bonus of eating popcorn together.

"Before the experiment, we thought that film therapy would work, but it would not be as effective as professional counseling," said Ronald Lord. "The results show that couples have a fairly good understanding of the right and wrong behaviors in their relationship. It is not necessary for others to teach them communication skills and ways of getting along with each other to adjust their emotional relationship. Just giving them the opportunity to think about what they are doing is enough."

What method is so magical?

You may have a big question in your little head: Is watching romance movies so useful?

Currently, the most widely used emotional intervention strategy comes from social learning theory, which states that the frequency and pattern of mutual reward and punishment behavior exchanges determine the degree of relationship satisfaction of partners.

Within this theoretical framework, psychologists focus on how couples handle disagreements. If couples have a poor attitude when solving problems, tend to blame each other or just do things half-heartedly, the relationship will deteriorate faster.

If we consciously encourage both parties to communicate more constructively, we can gradually alleviate the negative impact of conflicts, such as training couples in communication and problem-solving skills, and training them in empathy and compassion in emotional relationships.

There is a view that people in stable intimate relationships already have the basic ability to keep the relationship healthy and stable. They only need simple intervention to make both parties in the relationship aware of the real-time status of the relationship and maintain continuous observation.

Because when lovers are more aware of their relationship and have a stronger sense of identity, they will make more and more effective efforts. The romantic movie discussion method is a relationship awareness intervention method.

Relationship-aware intervention = proactive problem solving

The fact that maintaining the frequency of watching movies and discussing them afterwards can have such a good effect over a certain period of time shows that the most important thing is the partners' recognition of the relationship and the motivation of "willing to pay for the relationship." Once there is such motivation, couples will try to find the most suitable way to get along.

Past experience shows that even newlyweds with high relationship satisfaction may still have conflicts or secrets exposed, leading to one party's doubts about the relationship and eventually breaking up, such as physical fights or the other party hiding their financial situation.

Researchers found that couples who underwent relationship awareness intervention were more able to proactively deal with these problems. However, emotional intervention through professional counseling often does not achieve the expected results and may even produce the opposite result. In the experiment, one person who received communication and conflict resolution training did not significantly reduce negative behavior, and another person who received empathy and acceptance training even reduced his emotional support ability.

Professional counseling can provide skills to resolve conflicts, but it cannot effectively alleviate the depression and pain in emotional relationships. Sometimes, the emotional skills that we think are very important may make people more sensitive to minor flaws in the relationship. Training emphasizes practical skills, and the emphasis on skills also implicitly conveys a concept: the partner's ability to handle is the only criterion for judging whether the relationship is healthy or not. Once you think like this, you are wrong. Imagine that if TA's communication and negotiation skills do not meet the standards we have identified, then we may focus on the small problems in the relationship and then doubt whether the entire relationship can be maintained.

Watching romantic movies provides another possibility for emotional mediation.

What movies can help maintain emotional relationships?

Seeking professional help can sometimes make people feel that the situation is too serious to be fixed on their own. Especially when the relationship is still going strong, seeking professional help can add to the pressure. And there are many good counseling services out there—but they are expensive.

If you can adjust your relationship by yourself, it will be much easier. Compared with professional consultation, watching a movie and chatting is not scary at all, and it will not turn a small friction between two people into a disaster. It is cheap, just the price of two movie tickets and popcorn. Simple, cheap, perfect.

Although it is a love movie, you can't choose all kinds of movies. Especially the very romantic "chick movies" with stereotypes of love, such as "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle". The hero and heroine of such movies are usually together at the end of the movie. The audience can't see the real daily life of the couple, and it is very easy to impose extremely unrealistic fantasies and expectations on real intimate relationships.

Stills | When Harry Met Sally

The male and female protagonists in the movie may fall in love at first sight, but real love does not always happen quickly and does not require any effort to maintain.

The researchers selected movies such as "When a Man Loves a Woman", "9 Months of Pregnancy", "Husbands, Wives and Lovers" and "The Devil's Advocate". Most of these films show longer-term intimate relationships and emotional ups and downs, including quarrels between partners and how they support each other after a hard day. Then let the couples discuss how they deal with conflicts and support each other in the movies, and how we do it.

Stills | Husbands, Wives, & Lovers

It seems that it is not only the movie that can have an effect on the relationship, but more importantly, the time that the couple spends together to actively re-engage in the relationship and calmly examine their own behavior. Rod suggested that couples can make watching movies and discussing them a long-term habit, doing it every week, every month, or even celebrating it as a day like an anniversary.

The saddest thing is when life knocks you down, and when you return home, your loved one doesn't support you, but instead continues to rub salt into your wounds. If watching a movie can make couples re-examine their behavior, look at each other and say "I'm sorry, I shouldn't do this to the person I love the most", why not take action tonight?

References:

[1]Rogge, R., Cobb, R., Lawrence, E., Johnson, M., & Bradbury, T. (2013). Is skills training necessary for the primary prevention of marital distress and dissolution? A 3-year experimental study of three interventions.(Report)(Author abstract). Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 81(6), 949–961.

[2].https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/movie-date-night-can-double-as-therapy/

[3]https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/marriage-romantic-comedies-save-relationship-22356998

[4]https://www.rochester.edu/news/divorce-rate-cut-in-half-for-couples-who-discussed-relationship-movies/

Author: Carcosa

Editor: Muyi Yangyang

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