How Emotional Intelligence Impacts an Intimate Relationship

High emotional intelligence is associated with relationship satisfaction.

Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

• Couples with high emotional intelligence report greater marital satisfaction and fewer conflicts.
• Self-awareness is essential to identify our desires, form goals, and set boundaries in a relationship.
• Expanding our emotional intelligence is a powerful way to improve relationship satisfaction.

Having a high degree of emotional intelligence is associated with general well-being, mental health, and effective coping with life challenges. So, it makes perfect sense that couples with high emotional intelligence report greater marital satisfaction, fewer conflicts, and even a greater commitment to the relationship (Jardine, Vannier, & Voyer, 2022).

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence entails the following abilities:

• Self-awareness: to recognize your own emotions and how they influence your behavior.
• Self-regulation: the capacity to manage emotions in a healthy way, especially when responding to change.
• Motivating oneself: marshaling one’s emotions to help achieve goals.
• Empathy: the capacity to understand the emotions of others and offer them comfort and support.
• Social skills: to build and maintain healthy relationships and engage in healthy communication.

We may be strong or weak across all categories or have greater variation in our capacities for each skill set. Additionally, we may exhibit different levels of emotional intelligence in different contexts. For example, we may be self-motivating at work but not in our intimate relationship. Similarly, we may be able to self-regulate when facing certain kinds of challenges but fail to do so when confronting other challenges. I’ve had many clients report greater self-regulation when they are single than when they are in a challenging relationship.

Self-awareness and intimacy

Self-awareness of our internal emotional landscape informs our attitudes and behaviors in every aspect of our lives. It helps us to identify our desires, form goals, and even define boundaries in a relationship. Lacking such awareness, we may engage in ways that contribute to our feeling isolated and less satisfied. Consequently, without such awareness, we may unwittingly relate with a loved one in ways that are nonconstructive, perhaps simply mirroring our earlier problematic ways of being in a relationship.

In many relationships, one partner may have greater emotional intelligence than the other. That partner may struggle to guess how the other feels. They may feel frustrated when they express their feelings, only to experience their partner’s silence or the accusation that they were being too emotional.

One woman I worked with, who had greater emotional intelligence than her husband, often complained about her husband’s lack of expressing his feelings. She questioned if he was simply afraid to share them, was confused about them, or was just withholding them due to indifference or anger with her.

Self-regulation and intimacy

Years ago, I saw a client who lacked the capacity to sit with her anxiety. She was unable to soothe herself, a key aspect of emotional regulation. Her husband would offer a variety of strategies, few of which she tried. He had been in therapy and was quite resilient in his self-regulation but felt inadequate and frustrated as she refused to consider his suggestions. She had even stated, “If you really loved me, you would be able to help me.”

Her anxiety led to reduced cognitive flexibility, a lack of being open to finding solutions for herself. With increased frustration, her husband began to withdraw and after a while recognized it was not his role to fix her. He had sufficient emotional intelligence to be empathic, and rather than try to offer her solutions, he instead expressed his empathy with words of compassion. In time, she became more motivated to work on her anxiety rather than expecting him to help her fix it.

Empathy and intimacy

Lacking emotional awareness undermines our capacity to be more fully empathic with a partner. This is reflected by a man I worked with who described being raised with “tough love.” He had learned to suppress and repress the emotional pain he experienced as a child. Lacking empathy for his own feelings, he remained out of touch with his partner’s feelings.

We must be able to recognize and acknowledge our internal emotional landscape if we are to be genuinely empathic. He responded to hurt expressed by his wife in the following ways: “You shouldn’t feel that way”; “You think that’s bad, you should have seen my friend’s broken wrist”; or “Well, remember, there are lots of people who have it much worse than you.” Clearly, these types of comments were not empathic for her suffering. Rather, they often exacerbated her hurt as she then felt that her feelings were being diminished.

He had learned this way to deal with his own suffering as a child from his father as well as from cultural expectations of what it means to be a “real” man.

Motivating oneself and intimacy

The capacity to harness one’s emotions plays a significant role in motivating oneself, whether with regard to individual goals or with a relationship. A lack in this capacity leaves one more passive in a relationship and potentially hoping that a partner will say or do something to provide the motivating energy. While part of a loving relationship entails support and encouragement, fully expecting the energy for motivation to come from a partner is an example of “parentizing” a partner and “infantilizing” oneself—a sure contributor to relationship conflict.

Social skills and intimacy

Social skills are essential for effective interaction in any relationship but are especially important in a loving intimate relationship. They include the capacity for active listening and clear verbal and nonverbal expression. Such communication clearly rests on self-awareness that informs one’s attitudes, needs, and desires.

Social skills also call for the capacity to “read” another, to sense what a person might be feeling and what might be important to them. Additionally, they include the capacity to be empathetic with them. Finally, social skills involve the capacity to constructively resolve conflicts and work together for problem-solving that is focused on solutions.

Differences in emotional intelligence

A relationship in which partners have different degrees of emotional intelligence can improve when the one with less emotional intelligence is motivated to enhance their emotional intelligence. When this is the case, the partner with greater emotional intelligence can both challenge and support the other partner’s emotional growth.

By contrast, a partner with higher emotional intelligence needs to be mindful of unrealistically expecting a partner with less emotional awareness to understand their feelings. And a partner with lower awareness might perceive their partner as being overly emotional and even intrusive.

It’s important to emphasize that emotional intelligence is not fixed, but, rather, it can be enhanced by learning new skills. Enhancing one's emotional intelligence can improve overall well-being and is especially meaningful for greater marital satisfaction, less conflict, and greater commitment to the relationship. This is especially true when partners can support and value such development.