COVID-19: The Effect on Married Couples' Social Lives

A recent study has shown that COVID-19 has caused disturbances in relationships because of limited social gatherings.

A study found that COVID-19 not only had a worldwide impact on health but also harmed relationships among married couples due to lockdowns and reduced social connections. Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles were the first to investigate the pandemic-related loss of connections with family, friends, and colleagues among diverse couples recruited from low-income neighborhoods. The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Low-Income Couples Interactions Affected the Most During COVID-19

Following the lockdowns and restrictions on public gatherings in the early days of COVID-19, the social networks of White, Black, and Latino couples all shrank ().

But these networks shrank most significantly among lower-income, Latino and Black couples and didn't fully recover even after vaccines became available and the most severe restrictions were lifted.

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"Limiting social interactions may well have reduced the spread of infection," said lead author Benjamin Haggerty, a doctoral student in the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab, "but this policy also had unexamined and potentially lasting social costs".

Psychologists found that when the pandemic began, face-to-face interactions declined overall by 50%, with little recovery over the next 18 months.

Black and Latino couples and those with lower incomes, they discovered, maintained even fewer of their relationships than white couples and those with higher incomes.

Virtual Interactions Also Declined

While many people attempted to compensate for a lack of in-person gatherings through increased use of technologies like Zoom and FaceTime, the researchers found that among the couples they studied, even virtual interactions declined during the first months of the pandemic.

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Significantly, these declines weren't restricted to particular types of relationships - they affected connections with family, friends, and co-workers alike.

"What happened to those lost relationships? One answer is that some simply could not be sustained for so long without frequent interactions to nourish them," said study co-author Benjamin Karney, co-director of the lab.

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In general, for white couples and for wealthier couples, the picture was a bit rosier.

The findings suggest that to prepare for future disease outbreaks, there is a need to develop ways to limit pathogen transmission without harming the in-person interactions necessary to sustain meaningful relationships.

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Reference:

Lasting Declines in Couples’ Social Network Interactions in the First Years of COVID - (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231169591)

Source-IANS