Can fights in a romantic relationship affect your physical health?

From affecting the way your skin reacts to being a cause of crushing panic attacks to even disturbing your bowel movements, fights may not always be crucial to a healthy relationship

For Stuti Ghosh, a 27-year-old software engineer based in Nagpur, the visual of a happy relationship was mired in endless fights, always being on the edge, and communication so persistent, it would veer into overcommunication. 

“As is the case with most of us, we often associate the feeling of having butterflies in the stomach with love, but it was only recently that my therapist told me those butterflies equalled to anxiety for me,” she says. “To meet him (my partner) was a task in itself, not knowing when he would snap, or get into one of his mood swings, get annoyed at the smallest of things.” 

The physical effects on Ghosh were manifold: She would skip meals, and would be up all night, conjuring up the most bizarre situations in her mind. Within a month, she had an acne breakout. “My hair was all frizzy and I derived no joy in working on my health or my life. He had sucked all the hope and love from my life.” 

According to a new study titled Marital negativity’s festering wounds: The emotional, immunological, and relational toll of couples’ negative communication patterns, arguments with one’s partner may not always be healthy for the well-being of the relationship. The study adds that couples’ “negative communication patterns” threaten immune and emotional health, leaving partners vulnerable to illness.

Simply put, constant, debilitating fights in a romantic relationship can pretty much mess up one’s physical health. The old wisdom of fights being essential to the growth of a relationship might just need to be relooked at. But in what precise ways do fights affect our relationships? In Ghosh’s case, the physical evidence of how her relationship was affecting her, made her realise that she was in a toxic relationship in the first place. 

Understanding the body-mind landscape 

According to Kolkata-based psychiatrist Era Dutta, our body is often a manifestation of our mental health space. “If you’re mentally disturbed and anxious, it manifests in different ways, such as irritable bowel syndrome, which severely affects your bowel patterns. The unhealthy marriage of low immunity and stress due to demanding relationships also adds to the mix,” she says. “Because of stress, cortisol—the stress chemical–is always high and your flight-or-fight response will always be on, making you feel exhausted.   It then takes a toll on your physical immunity, leading to irregular sleep patterns and not getting enough time to exercise.” 

Dutta clarifies that this is not to say that an argument will immediately lead to a physical breakdown. But she goes on to explain that some personality types might have panic attacks or pseudo seizures. “If you had a terrible fight with your partner and you are hyperventilating all the time, gasping and yelling and throwing things, you will end up going to the emergency room; this is referred to as the somatic manifestation of stress.”

In Ghosh’s case, the increased cortisol production would lead to increased oil production in her skin glands, thus leading to clogged pores and acne breakouts. This mechanism of the body and mind, in the context of stress caused due to relationships, is rather simple—the brain-skin axis is an interconnected, bi-directional pathway that can translate psychological stress from the brain to the skin and vice versa. After an intense argument with your partner, the result triggers the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a trio of glands that play key roles in the body’s response to stress.

There is also evidence that mast cells, a key type of pro-inflammatory skin cell in the brain-skin axis, respond to cortisol through receptor signalling, thus leading to multiple skin conditions, even something as small as an itch. 

But how does one differentiate between the usual fights in a relationship with the ones that will physically affect you?

“We say that relationships can’t be perfect because there will be ups and downs,” Dutta adds. “But if there are certain fundamental issues that keep surfacing without any resolution, and also affect other avenues of your life, then that’s a crucial sign.”

Navigating the effects 

In the case of Debojyoti Mukherjee, his pre-existing conditions were exacerbated because of the arguments he had with his former partner. It would manifest into bloating, splitting headaches and an overall lack of appetite. 

“I don’t blame her entirely because it’s easy to slot things into black and white,” he admits. “But what I do know is that we just didn’t know when to stop, unless one of us would start palpitating or have a seizure of sorts. This is far from healthy, to say the least.”

Both of them sat down and asked each other if it was necessary to extend a fight, each time, till it reached a stage where it physically harmed them. More than a screaming match, it had become an ego war, both of them probing things, bringing things from the past that had no bearing in the present. It was no longer about working towards the health of the relationship. 

“These arguments and their repercussions on one’s health affects children and everyone else in the vicinity of the couples,” says Nahid Dave, a psychiatrist based in Navi Mumbai. “If your cortisol level is increasing because you are getting worked up, it will also trigger the people around you.”

How does one react and address the situation if a particular argument has triggered the partner, perhaps  even resulting in them having a panic attack and hyperventilating? 

“Take a pause if you can see your partner is getting affected,” explains Dave. “Everything doesn’t have to be said in a fit of anger. Many times, the things we say in anger are not meant; we are saying them only because we want to hurt the other person.”

More than anything, Dave says that being aware of one’s physical state is also crucial, particularly when one is angry. “You have a choice when you’re aware of how you want to respond to it, and if you’re not, you might do things you will end up regretting.”

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