It’s amazing how much research is done in the field of couples counseling.  I’ve just come across an in-depth study on how shyness influences marital satisfaction.  The study is by Levi Baker and James K. McNulty, and is called ”Shyness and Marriage: Does Shyness Shape Even Established Relationships?”  It’s published by SAGE.

I love reading academic studies like this, because they have to start by defining “What is shyness”, and there is of course a psychological test which has been developed to measure this.  There are also well established scales used in marriage counseling to assess how happy you are in your marriage.    The researchers were able to apply these “instruments” to a few hundred couples, run some sophisticated statistical analysis, and add another insight.

If I sound just a touch cautious about this, it’s just because during my short time as a blogger in the field of couples therapy I’ve come across a few contradictory reports on how living together before you marry affects your long-term success.  You can visit my post on “Is Marriage Bad for Couples Therapists?” for more on that.  There are so many factors in this field, that you can never be sure what got left out, and that another paper won’t pop up with exactly the opposite conclusions, just as beautifully researched.

The main result from Baker and McNulty was that if you are shy, you will find it just as easy to find a partner as everyone else.  But you won’t be as happy.  There’s a poignant twist.  Your partner maybe blissfully happy with the relationship, partly because you may be too shy to tell them that they need to shape up and meet your needs more.

Researchers use the term “relationship self-efficacy” to measure this.  Couples are asked to determine how much they believe they are able to overcome relationship problems.  Shy people tend to believe there isn’t much they can do to get what they need from their partner.  It may even be that shyness on its own is not a problem in relationships, but because shy people believe they aren’t effective at addressing relationship problems, the underlying problem is that they accept situations for longer than is healthy for the relationship.

Maybe this is a study about a particular group of shy people, that has lessons for us all?  As I talk to marriage counselors in Imago,  I often hear about couples where one person is highly dissatisfied with how the relationship is, and the other doesn’t see much need for change at all.  In-fact when people turn to couples counseling for help, it’s an admission of the breakdown of “relationship self-efficacy”.  In effect people are saying “I can’t create the relationship I need, please do it for me.”

What I like about Imago couples therapy is that the response isn’t “Sure, just sit there and I will fix your relationship for you.”  It’s highly focused on giving each partner the hope and the skillls they need to fix their own relationship.  Whether you are shy or not, it feels like the ultimate role of couples counseling is to teach you to “do it yourself”.