Reading people’s emotions is a subtle art. Couples who are together or married a long time are generally very skilled at reading the other’s states, emotions, or, as the saying goes, finishing each other’s sentences. But women and men can differ in the things they pick up on – and particularly in how their perception affects their level of satisfaction with the relationship. A new study finds that men are happier when their ladies pick up on their positive emotions, while women are more satisfied when men “feel their pain.”

A lot of research has looked at the connection between picking up on what your spouse is feeling and satisfaction with the relationship. Mostly, it has found a positive connection: the more “empathetic accuracy” there is, the better the relationship. But some studies have arrived at different conclusions, suggesting that there isn’t always a benefit in intuiting the feelings of the other person.

For example, when times are good, it’s probably pretty healthy for the relationship if you’re accurately picking up on your partner’s happiness. On the other hand, when times are stressful or conflicted, intuiting the unhappiness of your significant other can put a strain on things, particularly on your well being and possibly on your overall satisfaction with the relationship. But this good time-bad time dichotomy also seems to depend on whether you’re a man or a woman: Men seem to have a harder time when they sense that their partners' moods are negative.

To understand these differences in more detail, a team had 156 couples come into the lab and describe a past situation that had led to some sort of unhappiness or frustration. Then they had the couples talk it out together, filming them while they did. The videos were replayed to the participants, who rated their emotion, from “very negative” to “very positive.” Later, the other partner watched snippets of the videos that were the most emotionally charged and rated them.

The results showed that there was a strong connection between men being able to accurately read their women’s positive emotions and the men’s satisfaction with the relationship.

But the story was different for women: Their relationship satisfaction had more to do with how negative feelings were perceived. For instance, wives who intuited their husband’s unhappy emotions were more likely to be satisfied in their relationship than women who correctly gauged their partner’s happy emotions. Even more interesting was the fact that when men were able to pick up on their wives’ negative feelings, their wives were more likely to report marriage satisfaction – but the men themselves were not. In other words, women were more satisfied when their men “felt their pain” and when they felt their husband’s pain.

If this all seems very lopsided, it is. Why is men’s satisfaction connected to perceiving positivity, while women’s is linked to perception of negative emotions? It might be that picking up on negativity may actually alienate men, perhaps because they feel like they or the relationship might be threatened. Women, on the other hand, seem to feel closer to their mates when they sense even emotional negativity.


But where women may feel closer when they perceive any kind of emotion from a partner – even negative ones – men might feel that there’s something bigger at stake when their partner is feeling negative. Why this divide in men’s and women’s perceptions exists isn’t so clear.

What is clear is that perception is relative – or, put another way, the “felt sense of being understood is in the eye of the beholder.” In fact, the study also found that how motivated, sensitive or responsive the spouses believed the others were (separate from how they actually were) was a big predictor of marital happiness. This was true for both sexes, but especially for women. And, as the authors suggest, “Individuals’ perceptions of their partners’ effort to understand may be more important in maintaining the relationship than their partners’ actual success at understanding.”

Given the fact that marital problems are one of the most common reasons for seeking mental help, according to the study, understanding the sex differences in marital happiness is especially important. And given the rate of divorce, it’s even more so. Much of marriage counseling involves helping people feel more empathy, and understand the negative emotions of their spouses. Women, whom seem naturally more in tune with their mates' negative emotions, may use this understanding to help fix whatever's going on. And for their husbands, “Helping men to understand their partners’ negative emotions may allow them to stay engaged during interchanges in which women desire their partner’s engagement and men are inclined to withdraw in response.”