A bad day at work may leave you feeling less in love, study suggests

Experiencing a demanding day at school, friction with coworkers, or an unexpected car repair may take an unseen toll on a romantic partnership. A recent study suggests that on days when individuals experience more outside stress than usual, their feelings of love, passion, and closeness toward their partners tend to temporarily drop. The findings were published in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Relationship scientists distinguish between tensions that occur directly between romantic partners and what they term non-relationship stress. Non-relationship stress refers to pressures and hassles that begin outside the couple, such as heavy workloads, traffic snarls, family disagreements, and unexpected bills. While these events do not stem from the partnership itself, emotional strain from the outside world can still seep into life at home.

Researchers have spent years tracking how everyday strain impacts couples. For instance, a 2009 review pointed out that external pressures like workplace demands and money difficulties are consistently linked to lower relationship satisfaction. In addition, an earlier study of couples found that people who had experienced more stressful life events were more attuned to day-to-day changes in their partner’s negative behaviors, while stress was not linked to how they perceived positive ones.

Despite this broad knowledge about relationship satisfaction, scientists have paid less attention to the distinct emotional components that keep couples together. Love involves deep emotional bonding and wanting the best for another person, while passion centers on physical attraction and physiological excitement. Intimacy, meanwhile, describes the subjective sense of closeness, emotional safety, and shared vulnerability between two people. Rather than remaining permanently fixed, these core feelings can shift, as a 2012 daily diary study found that closeness and romantic passion naturally rise and fall from one day to the next.

“This study aimed to better understand the impact of non-relationship stress (i.e., issues at work or with family members) on romantic relationships, specifically feelings of love, passion, and intimacy,” lead author Ece Yilmaz of the University of Ottawa told PsyPost. “Romantic relationships are a central part of one’s life and some of its key components are the feelings of love, passion, and intimacy. We wanted to understand how much these feelings are impacted by external factors that are not related to one’s romantic relationship.”

The research, conducted with Sarah C. E. Stanton of the University of Edinburgh, was designed to test whether people with generally more stressful lives felt less love, whether day-to-day spikes in outside hassles specifically diminish daily love, passion, and intimacy, and whether one person’s outside stress crosses over to affect their partner.

To explore these dynamics, the researchers recruited 100 romantic couples living in a large city in the United Kingdom. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 64 years old, with an average age of about 24, and had been together anywhere from three months to over 35 years. The sample included 87 mixed-gender couples and 13 same-gender or gender-diverse couples, with roughly 70 percent of participants being students.

The study was preregistered on the Open Science Framework, with study materials and analysis plans posted publicly and the data available upon request. After an initial laboratory session where participants reported background information like relationship length, both partners completed brief online surveys each evening for 14 consecutive days. Each evening before midnight, participants answered questions independently about their day without discussing their responses with their partner.

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The daily surveys tracked non-relationship stress using a checklist of ten common daily hassles, including household chores, transit problems, illness, and conflicts with friends or coworkers. Participants also rated their daily positive and negative moods using standard emotion checklists. Finally, using one question for each feeling, they rated how much love, passion, and closeness they felt in their relationship that day on a seven-point scale, where higher numbers indicated stronger feelings.

The researchers used specialized statistical models designed for romantic couples, which allowed them to separate two distinct types of patterns. They examined whether people with higher stress on average across the two weeks reported lower romantic feelings compared to other people. They also examined whether a person experienced lower romantic feelings specifically on days when their own stress spiked higher than their personal baseline.

The analyses indicated that daily fluctuations played a central role. On days when an individual experienced more non-relationship stress than they typically did, their feelings of love, passion, and intimacy toward their partner were lower that evening. This pattern held even when the researchers statistically accounted for the participant’s daily mood, relationship length, and how connected they had felt the previous day. The associations were small: each additional hassle beyond a person’s usual was linked to ratings roughly 0.04 to 0.13 points lower on the seven-point scale, though the authors note that small daily effects could add up over time.

In contrast, people who generally carried more daily stress across the two-week period were not significantly lower in average love, passion, or intimacy than people with less stressful lives. The authors suggest, drawing on stress-and-coping theory, that people who are routinely stressed may have developed ways to manage it, though coping was not measured.

“It was surprising to see that people who experience more stress than others did not report lower levels of love, passion, and intimacy,” Yilmaz explained. “This indicates that the negative effects of external stress are related to one experiencing more stress than usual and not related to their general stress level. In other words, if you are usually stressed you know how to cope with it and it does not impact your relationship as much. But if you are experiencing more stress than usual, you also feel lower love, passion, and intimacy in your relationship.”

In the primary models, a partner’s daily or average stress levels were not statistically significant direct predictors of how the other person felt. “Additionally, there were no significant partner effects,” Yilmaz noted. “This means that the external stress your partner is going through does not impact your feelings of love, passion, and intimacy in your relationship.”

Daily mood showed strong connections to relationship feelings, with a worse mood tied to lower daily passion and intimacy and a better mood tied to higher passion and intimacy. In exploratory analyses, the researchers found patterns consistent with a sequence in which more outside stress was linked to lower positive mood and higher negative mood, which were in turn linked to weaker romantic feelings. A partner’s stress also showed up indirectly: it was linked to a person’s own mood, which was in turn linked to their romantic feelings.

These observations align with an investigation of momentary desire, which examined momentary sexual desire and arousal rather than broader daily feelings of love, passion, and intimacy, and similarly found that higher stress in the moment was linked to lower sexual desire and arousal.

“The main takeaway is that experiencing stress unrelated to one’s relationship is still connected to one’s romantic relationship,” Yilmaz emphasized. “If you are feeling lower love, passion, and intimacy towards your partner, this may be due to the external stress you are experiencing. And this is especially true if you are experiencing higher levels of stress than usual. These findings could be helpful for people going through stressful times to understand that the reduced feelings in their relationship might not be about their relationship as much as they think.”

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The participants in this sample were mostly young and in early-stage relationships lasting an average of 2.8 years, with 85.5 percent dating rather than married or in a civil partnership and only 38 percent living together. On the seven-point scale, average daily love was roughly 6.6, and participants reported about one outside hassle per day on average.

Because 85.5 percent of participants were White and 80 percent identified as heterosexual, the patterns might look different in more diverse samples. And because most couples reported high levels of love, the authors note the results may not extend to couples experiencing chronic relationship distress.

The way stress was measured also presents an important consideration. The researchers used a checklist that recorded whether certain stressful events happened, but it did not measure how overwhelming or intense each event felt to the person experiencing it. Missing a bus or having an extra chore does not feel the same to everyone, and capturing subjective severity could provide a fuller picture of how strain relates to romance.

Because the study tracked daily ratings rather than manipulating stress in a controlled experiment, the design cannot confirm direct cause and effect. It remains possible that underlying feelings of exhaustion or subtle changes in partner interactions influenced both how people perceived stress and how they rated their relationship, or that a bad day in the relationship led people to report more outside hassles, such as arguments with family. Future investigations could follow couples across longer periods and examine whether psychological resources, such as emotion regulation skills, help buffer romantic bonds against outside pressures.

The study, “Is Love Gone or Are You Stressed? Examining Daily Associations Between Non-relationship Stress and Love, Passion, and Intimacy in Couple Relationships,” was authored by Ece Yilmaz and Sarah C. E. Stanton.