There are many aspects to maintaining a healthy, happy relationship, but how your relationship impacts your emotional well-being is important too. Research has indicated that personal relationships are largely where people derive their sense of meaning in life—defined by researchers as how people “comprehend, make sense of, or see significance in their lives.” But it hasn’t been clear what it is about relationships that helps people find meaning.
A recent study gets us closer to an answer: Research from McGill University, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that couples who hold a shared worldview (being on the same page about their understanding of the world) experienced less uncertainty and found more meaning in their lives.
Researchers conducted five studies of nearly 1,300 adults in the U.S. and Canada, pooling data from lab-based tasks, online surveys, and experiments. They were testing the hypothesis that experiencing a sense of shared reality with a close partner reduces uncertainty about one’s environment, which in turn boosts meaning in work and life. For instance, they found that front-line healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Americans during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations reported feeling less uncertainty and more meaning when their partner’s understanding of the world matched their own.
“Our approach was different from earlier work on how relationships promote meaning, which tended to focus on aspects like belonging or support,” said lead author and psychologist M. Catalina Enestrom in a press release. “We set out to explore whether sharing thoughts, ideas and concerns about the world with a romantic partner could enhance meaning by reducing uncertainty about one’s environment.”
What building a shared reality with your partner looks like
Having that shared perception of reality with your partner, according to the study, helps make your reality seem true while validating your perspective. Over time, the more experiences you share with your partner, the closer you can become to sharing a worldview.
“As couples accumulate shared experiences, shared feelings, goals, and memories, they develop a generalized shared reality,” senior author John Lydon, psychology professor at McGill University, said in the press release. “This is different from simply feeling close or supported. It’s not just ‘my partner gets me,’ it’s ‘we get it.’”
Enestrom pointed out that shared reality can emerge from both aligned experiences and interpretations.
“Shared reality can form, for instance, when a couple watches a horror movie together and one or both partners perceive that they both find it scary,” she said. “But shared reality doesn’t necessarily require shared experiences. One partner can describe a stressful event they experienced, and if the other partner sees it the same way, this too can foster shared reality.”
The more shared reality experiences you accumulate together, the more likely you are to build a shared understanding of the world in general, she explained. As couples become closer through a shared reality, researchers also observed a greater sense of meaning in life, where individuals have a strong feeling of purpose, which research indicates can lead to better coping, greater happiness, and improved health outcomes.
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