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How Disaster Can Be Good for a Relationship
The headline to this article might sound like a contradiction, but emotions interact in complicated and mysterious ways. Deeply negative feelings can create space for powerful positive feelings to emerge. Occasionally, a personal tragedy will start with sorrow but evolve into a renewed appreciation for life.
Longitudinal studies — scientific studies that monitor people over multiple points in time — are difficult to run in the context of tragedies. To understand how people feel before and after a tragedy, you need to know when the tragic event will occur so you can plan the timing of your experiment, and that’s usually not possible.
However, longitudinal data is essential if you really want to understand how a person’s emotional life changes following a tragedy. To give us those insights in the context of relationships, one recent study turned a chance occurrence with one of America’s biggest natural disasters into an opportunity to collect valuable data.
When Harvey hit the newlyweds
In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas, causing $125 billion worth of damage and killing over 100 people. As far as…
