Professor Benjamin Karney: Key Points on Relationships

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/12/06

Professor Benjamin Karney is a Professor of Social Psychology at UCLA and the co-director of the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab. His research focuses on the impact of external stressors on intimate relationships, especially in early marriage. Karney has extensively studied low-income, Latinx, Black, and White newlywed couples and military marriages.

Karney discusses couples’ challenges in maintaining intimacy, noting that external factors and personality traits, such as conscientiousness and neuroticism, influence relationship success. He emphasizes the importance of being responsive to a partner’s individual needs. Karney also highlights the difficulty of maintaining perspective in relationships and advises giving partners the benefit of the doubt while recognizing that not all relationships are worth sustaining.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are here with Professor Benjamin Karney or Ben Karney. What do you prefer?

Professor Benjamin Karney: Ben is shorter. Both are accurate.

Jacobsen: I’ll go with Ben because it’s shorter. I remember interviewing James Flynn before he passed. I asked him, “What do you prefer to be called?” He said, “What do you prefer to call me?” I said, “Jim.” So, Jim, it was.

Karney: Ben is fine. Ben is what my friends call me.

Jacobsen: Ben is great. So, what is your role at the university? Why did you choose this particular area of expertise and research? Then, we can dive into the main discussion.

Karney: So, those are two questions. The shorter answer is that I am a psychology professor and the chair of the social psychology area within the psychology department. I’m also the co-director of the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab. I’ve been studying intimate partnerships in couples for about 35 years. What got me into the field was caring a lot about intimate relationships and noticing that they seem difficult for even good, thoughtful people to maintain.

I was young when I got into it, and I remember thinking, “Gee, I hope I don’t get divorced.” Everyone in the world hopes that, and yet many people do. So, there’s a real mystery around intimacy, especially in marriage. People enter marriage thinking, “I want this to work,” and they give it their all. Yet, many people get divorced anyway, which is an undesired outcome.

And that’s mysterious. People don’t predict they’ll get divorced. Nobody gets married hoping or thinking they’ll get divorced, yet so many do. So, that means something unexpected happens in intimacy that people themselves don’t fully understand. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to study it.

And 35 years later, I’m still working on it. It’s an enduring question. That’s how I got into it.

Jacobsen: Your work is recognized. You have over 20,000 citations, a significant metric for the impact of your research in academia.

Karney: I hope that’s true. I don’t fool myself into thinking that my work will solve divorces or breakups. Still, I do hope it helps people feel more informed about relationships. If no one else has been helped, I know I have been. I am more informed. However, it didn’t save me. I’ve been married, but I was married once before and got divorced—as a marital researcher.

I knew the field. I knew all the literature. I knew all the things you’re supposed to do. I had already written a book on intimate relationships. I’d written the book on intimate relationships, but my relationships could have been better. My first marriage could have been better.

Jacobsen: And what are some of the lessons from your work? 

Karney: One of the big lessons, in particular, is that not everything about your intimate relationship is within your control. There are many forces external to the couple that are easy to overlook but play a very important role in a couple’s ability to maintain intimacy over time.

Jacobsen: I have two questions. First, I want to consider intrinsic and extrinsic factors. So, let’s start with an expert opinion: Are there some people for whom relationships are not suited in terms of their temperament over the arc of their lives?

Karney: Yes, undoubtedly. Much research shows that some people are better at intimacy than others. The individual’s stable qualities are associated with more success in intimate relationships.

The question you asked is, are there some people who don’t want relationships? And, undoubtedly, there are. Some people don’t want relationships for various reasons. Either their personal experiences with relationships have been negative, so they decide, “I don’t want it anymore.” Or their personal experiences with closeness and dependence on others have been so fraught and painful that they’ve learned to avoid other people.

There are plenty of people who don’t want relationships. Others want relationships but, for various reasons, aren’t well-equipped to handle what relationships require. People with a history of depressive episodes have a harder time in relationships. People struggling with substance abuse have harder times in relationships.

People who are prone to feeling negative emotions—those who are stably negative—are also known as having high negative affectivity or neuroticism. On average, people who score high on that trait tend to have worse relationships. People have different attachment styles, and those who are insecurely attached have a harder time in relationships.

Some qualities affect your ability to have a positive or negative relationship. Some people are great at relationships and generally do better in any relationship because they are easygoing, don’t tend to dwell on negative emotions, are generally not defensive, and are mentally healthy.

They may have had good experiences in the past, so they trust relationships overall. A long list of stable individual qualities contributes to more or less relationship success.

Jacobsen: Now, shifting to a more constructive and positive frame, which will be a useful part of this series: What are some of the bases for those traits intrinsic to the individual, not necessarily external forces?

Karney: If we focus on individual qualities that contribute to successful intimacy, we first need to define it. 

Jacobsen: What is intimacy? What is the challenge? What is the process by which an individual quality can either facilitate or inhibit intimacy? 

Karney: There have been many definitions of intimacy. Where I come from, as a social psychologist, intimacy has been defined as a process in which partners are appropriately responsive to each other’s disclosures. I credit this to a famous social psychologist named Harry Reis—R-E-I-S. He’s a genius, still alive, and a leader in the field.

Some decades ago, he developed the intimacy process model. He said intimacy isn’t about how much I share with you or how well you listen to me. No. Intimacy is a dyadic process where one partner discloses something—it could even be a nonverbal disclosure—and the other responds somehow. Intimacy is furthered when that response makes the first person, the discloser, feel understood, validated and cared for.

That process differs for each couple because the things that make me feel understood, validated, and cared for might differ from those that make me feel understood, validated, and cared for. When intimacy is working, each partner understands the other well enough to respond in a way that makes the other person feel understood, validated, and cared for. Let me give you an example.

I come home from work and say, “Boy, I had a rough day at work today.” Now, you have an opportunity to respond. You might say, “You had a rough day at work. Come here on the couch. Tell me all about it. I will wrap you in a blanket of love and care for you. I’ll give you a back rub. I’m here for you.”

Now, for some people, that would be the perfect response. It’s exactly what they want—to be soothed and blanketed with love. If I’m that person, your response makes me feel understood, validated and cared for. Intimacy is enriched. But there might be other people for whom that is the wrong response.

When I say I had a bad day at work, I might need to decompress alone, to be in my “cave,” needing some space. I suggest you handle things around the house so that I can have time to myself. In that case, if I’m that person and you respond with, “Let me blanket you with love,” you are making the problem worse. I’m already feeling overwhelmed, and now you’re overwhelming me. I do not feel understood, validated, or cared for.

The intimacy process model says it’s not behaviour that leads to intimacy. Intimacy sometimes looks different for every couple. It’s about being responsive to your partner’s needs and way of being. Being responsive to your partner is the key to intimacy—being aware of what your partner personally needs in the moment.

Jacobsen: So, if that’s intimacy, what qualities make someone good at that?

Karney: All right, let me dive into that.

So, there are lots of different ways to approach that. You can approach it from the lens of personality theory. Personality theorists say, “Hey, people have different traits.” You may have heard of the Big Five personality traits.

The idea is that there are five big personality traits, and some of them are more associated with successful relationships than others. For example, I am highly conscientious, a personality trait that captures doing what is appropriate. In that case, I will consider what would be appropriate. I’ll be attuned to your needs, to your ups and downs.

Being highly conscientious makes me better at being responsive to you when needed. Indeed, highly conscientious people tend to have better relationships. Now, imagine that I have a different personality trait—neuroticism. Neuroticism is a general tendency to feel negative emotional states.

Let’s say I come home after a bad day at work, and I’m high in neuroticism. It might be hard for anything you do to penetrate my general tendency to feel bad. You might be unable to make me feel understood, validated, or cared for. No one in the world might have that ability because my tendency to feel negative mood states is so strong. In this case, what might make another couple feel closer doesn’t make us feel closer because my personality doesn’t allow it.

Or, your personality might affect how you respond to me when I come home and say I’m stressed. Let’s say you’ve had great experiences with closeness and intimacy. You’re comfortable with closeness and intimacy—a disposition you carry. When I say I’ve had a bad day, your response might be that you need me, and that’s great. You love being needed. It feels good to be needed, so you lean in, figure out what I need, and give it to me.

But what if you’re a different person? What if you’ve had relationships with overbearing people or relationships where you were abused, taken advantage of, or exploited in the past? You carry that history with you, which might make you wary of people asking you for things. It might make you mistrust people with needs. So, when I come home and say, “Whoa, I’ve had a bad day,” you hear that I need something. You might think, “Oh no, don’t come to me with your needs.” Your personality or history might lead you to respond with, “Well, that’s your problem,” or “I’ve also had a bad day—what do you want me to do about it?” That response wouldn’t make me feel understood, validated, or cared for.

If we understand the process, we can imagine how the individual differences both partners bring to the situation can either facilitate or inhibit it.

Jacobsen: On balance, are there more functional or dysfunctional ways to have a relationship?

Karney: There’s an infinite number of functional ways and an infinite number of dysfunctional ways. But your question reminds me of a famous quote by Tolstoy—I believe it’s the first line of Anna Karenina. The line is, and I might be misquoting it, “All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their way.” This quote gets cited a lot in my field because, generally speaking, it’s wrong.

It’s the opposite—the truth is that unhappiness in a couple typically looks the same. You’ve probably heard of John Gottman and his “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” If you’re in an unhappy relationship, you’re likely to experience withdrawal, anger, contempt, or rigidity. That’s exactly right. All unhappy couples are withdrawn, angry, contemptuous, or rigid, but you can be happy in many ways. There are many ways that couples figure out how to be happy.

Some couples say, “Hey, we will do separate things, and that’s okay. We’re going to live parallel lives.” Some couples are intertwined like two pieces of yarn, and that’s what they need to be happy. And that’s okay. There are many different ways to be happy in a relationship. But unhappy relationships all look very familiar and similar.

Jacobsen: Last question. What is a significant or the most significant factor for people to work on—something that isn’t part of their intrinsic personality structure, something they didn’t get from inheritance or early development—that can help increase the odds of staying together in a long-term relationship if that’s what they want?

Karney: I appreciate the question: A relationship is worth sustaining if it’s what you want. Not everyone wants that. And I’m not a therapist—I’m a scientist. I’m not really in the advice business. But if I had to offer advice based on my research, I’d say: You can’t control what happens to you, but you can try to attend to it.

It’s easy to focus on what our partners are doing now. Suppose our partner is letting us down, disappointing us, or frustrating us. In that case, it’s easy to get mad at them because the context that might explain their behaviour is usually invisible to us. Maybe our partner had a bad day. Maybe they had a bad experience 20 years ago that makes it hard to do what they’d love to do today.

Trying to keep that context in mind is a heavy lift. It takes work. But making the effort to give our partners the benefit of the doubt can be worthwhile—at least in decent relationships. In a terrible relationship, you shouldn’t give your partner the benefit of the doubt. If your partner is abusing you, you don’t need to do that—you should get mad.

But in a regular, decent relationship, it’s useful to make an effort to ask yourself, “Why is my partner disappointing me? Where is that coming from?” Suppose you can remember that your partner is a good person with a good heart who may have just had a bad day or experience. In that case, it’s often easier to return from anger, get over it, and move on with the connection.

Jacobsen: Ben, thank you for your time today on this quick blitz call.

Karney: It’s a blitz! If you need anything else, reach out.

Jacobsen: Excellent. Thanks so much. Take care.

Karney: Bye-bye. See you, Scott.

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