Is Your Marriage Stressing You Out?

Researchers at Binghamton University studied married couples who felt either supported by their spouses or not. In the latter group, the stress hormone, cortisol, was ever present in their saliva.

I was 32 and the mother of two toddlers the first time I sought out the help of a psychiatrist. During our first intake session, I told her that my spouse’s lack of support was becoming a constant source of chronic stress. If I could just feel seen, heard, and loved, I said, maybe I could turn off the endless tap of cortisol I could feel coursing through my bloodstream.

Over the next several years, my shrink and I went over, in minute and expensive detail, every memory and primary relationship from my past, looking for the original sources of my dysfunctional present. We found plenty of worthy candidates! And this was useful, up to a point. But looking at the past never did solve the problem of fixing a present-day marriage that needed either to change or to end. Nor did we look all that closely at the cost of the conflict on my physical and mental health.

I left my therapist first, then my husband. The weight that was lifted from untangling myself from that marriage—even as other stressors took its place—was profound. I could breathe again. Think again. Be myself again. Feel like I was finally back in my own skin. But twenty-three years of chronic stress had taken their toll. Were my many health issues and diagnoses, in the wake of that marriage, a result of its stress? It’s impossible to say for sure, but as oncologist Dr. Lorenzo Cohen, director of the Integrative Medicine Program at MD Anderson, has said, “Stress has a profound impact on how your body’s systems function. Stress makes your body more hospitable to cancer.”

I was thinking about all of this when I read a recent report of this study, “Social support and perceived partner responsiveness have complex associations with salivary cortisol in married couples,” by a team of Binghamton researchers. The researchers were looking to ascertain whether a perceived show of support by a spouse—during two basic, 10-minute interactions, in which marital issues would not be raised—could lower and/or regulate cortisol levels.

Instead—and unexpectedly—they discovered something more important. By measuring the couples’ cortisol levels before they took the test, the team of scientists could accurately predict which couples would perceive support in their interactions and which would not. In other words, in those couples who felt unsupported, cortisol levels in the saliva were already sky high. “One possibility,” said Haley Fivecoat, the lead researcher, “is that perceptions of how supportive a partner is can build over time and across several interactions; and the more general picture shapes how particular behaviors – good or bad – might be viewed in the moment.”

Fivecoat’s explanation fits in with my lived experience. In my high-conflict, low-support marriage, I went into even the most benign interactions pumped full of cortisol and primed for an inevitable battle of wills. Even thinking about a future interaction could cause a spike in cortisol and make me act out in ways I’m not proud of.

To wit: I once screamed at my husband, in front of our kids, for sneaking up behind me to squirt lemon onto the salmon I was cooking. It wasn’t that the high crime of lemon-squirting was so terrible. Or that the honey-mustard recipe I was using did not call for lemon. It wasn’t even my aversion to an unexpected sneak-up from behind, having once been assaulted and kicked unconscious by an assailant who, yes, snuck up behind me. It was that in most of our daily interactions leading up to that squirt, I’d felt not only unseen and unheard but as if I were constantly fending off marital breaches of boundaries. My relationship, in other words, never felt like a safe harbor. It felt like an endless game of whack-a-mole against both perceived and real intrusions.

The squirt thus became a stand-in for every unwanted overstep and boundary violation preceding it. My cortisol levels, which were already high, spiked into the stratosphere, and, like the camel’s straw, that lemon broke me. Again, I’m not proud of that moment, but it’s an apt example of what chronic stress in a marriage can look like on a random Tuesday. What it felt like was a body on such high alert, I could no longer relax, sleep, or function. I felt, in fact, hopeless.

Meanwhile, in my current low-conflict, high-support partnership—which, I want to stress, took me nine long years of healing, solitude, and many more relational mistakes to find, let alone relax into—those cortisol spikes of yesteryear are long gone. They have been replaced by a soothing and near-constant streams of oxytocin, along with frequent spikes of the other good stuff: dopamine, serotonin, endorphins. As a result, I have slept well and peacefully throughout our entire relationship, and I go into each interaction with my partner with a basic assumption of goodwill, grace, and love.

Why does any of this matter? Because as I’ve already written before, we, as a society, keep believing in and publishing Op-Eds¹ extolling the values and virtues of traditional marriage as the be-all, end-all panacea to what ails us. When it is actually love, simply put, behind which we should be rallying

A signed marital contract and vows spoken in front of friends and family do not confer automatic relational support or lower our cortisol levels. Only love does that. And by love I mean love as both a feeling of inner warmth and well-being and as an action verb. Which actions? To name just a tiny few: seeing, hearing, listening, bringing a coffee in bed, caretaking when the other is sick or enfeebled, compromising, hugging, offering to do the driving/dishes/laundry, changing plans when needed, minds when called for, supporting the other’s endeavors, making the meal, giving the other the benefit of the doubt, being attentive and loving in bed or what Dan Savage calls being “good, giving, and game.” (See video below.)

Even something as simple as making sure the shared home is in decent shape when your partner comes home from an extended journey can be a godsend, oxytocin-wise. I nearly dropped to my knees with gratitude last week when I walked in from a three-day trip, and the apartment was in much better shape than I’d left it. Never, in my two decades of marriage, had that ever been the case, and yes, these things matter. They really do make a difference.

I found a new shrink in my late forties to help me manage the stresses, sadness, and guilt of divorce. He, unlike my strictly Freudian first shrink, was trained and well-versed in somatic therapy. He paid close attention to my body language as I recounted my stories, always pausing to reset when he saw my cortisol levels spike in real time in his office. “Let’s put your feet on the ground, Deb,” he’d say. “Now breath and scan your body. Where are you feeling tension right now?” Cortisol, he explained—while useful for running away from lions, tigers, and bears—was the enemy, in every day human life, of both emotional and physical well-being as well as nearly every organ system in our bodies.

Because I’ve written candidly about my divorce, I often get asked by friends, acquaintances, and even readers of my books and this publication whether or not they, too, should get divorced. How do you know, they ask, when it’s time to pull the plug? As if I, by having pulled mine, hold the secret to anything. (I do not. I just knew, deep in my bones, that I had to leave my marriage or I would die. If that sounds hyperbolic, so be it. The science now bears me out.) I’ve always said, to those who ask—even before having read this study on cortisol levels in the spit of unhappy couples—that it really comes down to whether or not one’s partner is willing to put in the work to be more supportive. Getting divorced is stressful. Staying in an unsupportive marriage is stressful. You’re going to feel stress regardless. The good news is that the stress of divorce, thankfully, does end²; the bad news is that the chronic stress of an unsupportive marriage does not.

Proceed accordingly.

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Some notes!

• Ms. Magazine just published this amazing counterpoint to the outrageous Lancet series on the bogus “over-medicalization of menopause,” signed by over 250 medical professionals who treat women in menopause. This is an important read, well-worth your time.

• If you’re in or near Red Hook, Brooklyn this May, several of my photographs will be in a group show at the Basin Gallery, 344 Van Brunt Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231. The show is called “The Power of Light,” so there won’t be any of my war photos in it, but you will see some of the images I’ve been working on since leaving wars behind (and a few even from back then, shot in black and white between assignments.) Opening night is May 3, 2024, starting at 6 pm. If you get there by 7:30 pm, introduce yourself and say hi! But at 7:30 on the dot I have to dash, so come early, if you can. There will also be a “Sunday Soirée” party at the gallery to celebrate these works on Sunday, June 2, from 4-7 pm and a closing party on June 13, from 6-9 pm.

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1. The NYT just published a new one two weeks ago by Nick Kristof, and no, I will not be linking to it.

2. In the case of an abusive partner and a high-conflict divorce with small children, as a helpful reader just pointed out, the abuse never ends, even after divorce. They just sic their lawyers and other court professionals on you. Therefore the stress doesn’t end either. I would still argue for divorce in such cases, but I want to stress that each divorce, like each relationship, has its own set of parameters. Obviously, I cannot speak to each one, and that was the point of this final paragraph. We each have to find our own way to stay in or out of relationships that are no longer working.