If the pandemic has put a strain on your relationship, you might be thinking about going to couples therapy or taking a relationship course to help.
After all, research shows that certain relationship education courses can help participants improve their communication skills and relationship quality – which may even prevent divorce.
But our research found that whether such courses work for you partly comes down to your genes.
We set out to investigate whether differences in genetic sensitivity predict the degree to which people benefit from a relationship education programme. We found that people who were more sensitive were more likely to experience long-term benefits from a relationship programme.
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Initially, we found that people with higher genetic sensitivity scores had no greater immediate benefit from the relationship programme compared to those who were less sensitive. But after two years, highly sensitive people in the programme were shown to report better marital satisfaction, communication and positive bonding than less sensitivity people. They also reported lower risk of divorce.
Given these differences only emerged after two years, this could mean that sensitive people internalised the course’s lessons more deeply, and continued to apply the skills even after the course ended.
